Between June and October 2014 I chaired the Badge Alliance working group for Digital and Web Literacies. This was an obvious fit for me, having previously been on the Open Badges team at Mozilla, and currently being Web Literacy Lead.

We used a Google Group to organise our meetings. Our Badge Alliance liaison was my former colleague Carla Casilli. The group contained 208 people, although only around 10% of that number were active at any given time.

The deliverable we decided upon was a document detailing considerations individuals/organisations should take into account when creating a Privacy badge pathway.

Access the document here

We used Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map as a starting point for this work, mainly because many of us had been part of the conversations that led to the creation of it. Our discussions moved from monthly, to fortnightly, to weekly. They were wide-ranging and included many options. However, the guidance we ended up providing is as simple and as straightforward as possible.

For example, we advocated the creation of five badges:

1. Identifying rights retained and removed through user agreements
2. Taking steps to secure non-encrypted connections
3. Explaining ways in which computer criminals are able to gain access to user information
4. Managing the digital footprint of an online persona
5. Identifying and taking steps to keep important elements of identity private

We presented options for how learners would level-up using these badges:

• Trivial Pursuit approach
• Majority approach
• Cluster approach

More details on the badges and approaches can be found in the document. We also included more speculative material around federation. This involved exploring the difference between pathways, systems and ecosystems.

The deliverable from this working is currently still on Google Docs, but if there’s enough interest we’ll port it to GitHub pages so it looks a bit like the existing Webmaker whitepaper. This work is helping inform an upcoming whitepaper around Learning Pathways which should be ready by end of Q1 2014.

Karen Smith, co-author of the new whitepaper and part of the Badge Alliance working group, is also heading up a project (that I’m involved with in a small way) for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. This is also informed in many ways by this work.

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Comments? Questions? Comment directly on the document, tweet me (@dajbelshaw) or email me: doug@mozillafoundation.org

http://literaci.es/privacy-badge-pathway-doc