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The Badge Wiki barn raising gave us a frame…

cross-posted on the We Are Open Co-op blog

On July 26, 2017, an amazing community of more than 35 people came together to participate in our first Barn Raising session for Badge Wiki.

Image by J.E. Curtis (public domain)

If you want to skip straight to what we managed to create, head to the etherpad for the session, or check out all of the pages that now exist on Badge Wiki. Note that these are very much article ‘stubs’ at the moment, until the community has time to build them out.


We Are Open Co-op were delighted to see how many people came out in support from all around the world to kickstart the development of this new knowledge badge for the Open Badges community. Thanks go to Participate for making this possible, and for the Open Recognition Alliance for hosting us. We couldn’t have been any more pleased with how this session went if it had come with free ice cream! 🍦

We started out by introducing some of the people in the room and encouraging everyone to become acquainted with our etherpad. We used time during the introduction to the call to explain that the Badge Wiki should be the one-stop shop for all things badges. We also talked a little about the different roles that help a wiki community function. We expressed a desire for ambassadors or champions of the project to step forward, as well as contributors, page maintainers and patrons. At the start of any open project, it’s also important to identify the types of people who are (for good reason) unwelcome in the community. We don’t want trolls, haters and vandals and have documented our code of conduct.

Once we had the introductions out of the way, we moved on to the meat of the call: getting started building out the wiki! However, to do that we needed to consider what belongs there in the first place. So we asked the question: What pages do we need on Badge Wiki? And then we started to make a list. We generated the list using “silent etherpadding” a tried-and-tested brainstorming methodology that looks particularly pretty, producing a rainbow of contributions from participants.

After a few minutes of working silently, we asked everyone on the call to help organize the ideas into categories. People copied and pasted, deleted and reworded other people’s suggestions as we tried to organize all the ideas into overarching themes. Then we set to work creating stub pages on the wiki. It was a little tricky to figure out the best process for choosing pages. We decided to ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ and advised people to just start creating the pages.

Over the course of the hour, we created stubs for 36 pages! That means there’s plenty more to do. If you’d like to help, here’s what to do:

  1. Grab an account at Badge Wiki.
  2. Head to the etherpad, find something to work on, and use the strikethrough formatting so that the community knows you’re starting a new page.
  3. Use the search function at Badge Wiki at the top-right corner to search for the page name you’re trying to create. Click on the ‘Create new page’ option.
  4. Create your page stub! You can add as much or little detail as you’ve got time for,

Alternatively, you can begin adding content to pages we’ve already created. There’s a list of all the pages created which you can edit and improve using the links towards the top of the page once you’re signed in.

Our next Badge Wiki barn raising will be on Wednesday 23rd August. Details will be posted in the Loomio group, and on this blog.

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