Last week, we ran the first Keep Badges Weird community call, and it was even more energising than we expected it to be. We were so pleased to see so many people interested in the current and future status of badges and open recognition. We were elated to begin to have a deep conversation about counteracting the top-down focus of institutions and large organisations using badges for corporate stuff. There’s an outstanding question, for us, around how this community explores and thinks about the theoretical underpinnings of a Community of Practice (CoP), but one thing is for sure, Keep Badges Weird is a CoP.
When we started this project in the middle of last year, we knew that we wanted to bring together people who are motivated and who are influential in getting an organisation to start thinking about upskilling in a non-traditional way. We also wanted to make sure curious folks had a place to learn and engage.
“It was an interesting start to an important topic. I was thinking afterwards, pulling from the need of having metaphors and analogies, that #keepbadgesweird needs to come couple with #keepbadgessustainable, #keepbadgesviable, and #keepsbadgesuseful” (Stella Porto)
Community values?
We’re pleased that curious badge advocates as well as badge champions showed up to the KBW call. The call definitely had a positive(?) vibe about it — the community is truly interested in keeping badges WEIRD. We also acknowledged, however, that metaphors and analogies are required. Our shared language is contextual.
“How can we convey the usefulness of badges to recognise all different kinds of learning, participation and professional development?” — Esther Grieder
There are other things, though, that the community seemed to value as evidenced through the sorts of discussions we had about badging and co-creation. This community is interested in:
• Trust — We are using and building a shared language, but trying to ensure that diverse voices can be heard. Our call was for everyone, and we had people show up and contribute from a wide variety of backgrounds.
• Integrity — Based on the vibe at the community call, this community is a place where we can practice what we preach. There was honest discussion and admirable dissent. There was an obvious adherence to the idea that badging is about the learner, not about the issuer.
• Advocacy — There seemed to be a thread about the community’s job to advocate for that learner. Contributors spoke about the “true” value of badging within a community and balancing badges as community connectors vs personal certificates or markers.
These values indicate that we need some sort of a manifesto, a way to align the work the community does together. Community badges could start to signal what Serge Ravet and Julie Keane were really talking about — that badging can build a collective identity.
Community members pointed out that context matters and that trying to generalise may make it hard to be helpful to all participants. Co-creating a manifesto for the community might make a great frame for a future call.
Co-creating the “Moderator” badge
One of the things we intended to do on the community call was to define the metadata for the ‘CoP Coach’ badge. We envisioned that this would recognise moderation duties within the community, so we had in mind talking about benefits and responsibilities.
However, during the call, we split into two virtual rooms, with one focusing on this element of the discussion. This group started off, quite rightly, by questioning the name of the badge. Given we only had an hour together in total, we had interesting meta discussions but didn’t get into the metadata itself!
In our next community call, we would hope to take this further and perhaps pin down some of the criteria for this badge, so we can get on with deputising active community members and growing the KBW community
Next steps
Since the first KBW community call there have been useful suggestions and discussion, including ideas around building badges in sprints, creating a gallery of ‘weird’ badges, and potentially creating a website at a level above KBW which is for all different kinds of community projects related to badges and open recognition.
If you would like to be part of the discussion, join the community!