

Mozilla's Open Badge Project - benackles
http://openbadges.org/en-US/

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Aarvay
Why is Mozilla bent upon standardizing everything?

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benackles
I believe out of a legitimate concern of a few companies taking ownership of
the web. If there weren't standards who knows where we would be.
Standardization is the reason we all don't live under rules of AOL and
Internet Explorer. Now the power has shifted to three dominant players (Apple,
Google and Facebook) potential controlling everything. Initiatives to
standardize new technologies or trends continues to be important as the web
evolves into new areas. Gamification has a lot of space for standardization.
Mozilla is a great organization to spearhead new standard initiatives.

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twiceaday
The buttons look wrong on my Chrome 19.0.1055.1 dev-m.

<http://i.imgur.com/E5mZT.png>

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icebraining
Your system probably lacks a font that can render the unicode symbol they use:
❯

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dpritchett
Can't see it here either: Win7 / Chrome 17

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cobychapple
What other providers out there are using this so far? Is there a list of
issuers anywhere?

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benackles
That's a good question. I'm not sure if there's any list of issuers. However,
it is an open project and therefore any entity could become an issuer. They
list a few possible sources on the FAQ. I think many of the code education
startups, such as Code School, Treehouse and Codecademy would be an excellent
fit.

[1] <http://openbadges.org/en-US/faq.html>

[2] <http://codeschool.com>

[3] <http://teamtreehouse.com>

[4] <http://codecademy.com>

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lambada
The displayer technical docs give a 404 for me.

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zengr
Is this gamification of the web?

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benackles
This is an element of gamification. Gamification is the use of game thinking
and game mechanics to solve problems and engage people. Within game mechanics
there are six components. One component is achievement represented by badges.

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tbsdy
I tried it out as it's an interesting concept. Unfortunately, while I can
register and also participate in the introductory badges, whenever I try to
push to my backpack then confirm who I am, it seems to get stuck on
authenticating me forever :(

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drewjoh
This is happening for me as well on Firefox 10.0.2.

I was able to get it to work with Chrome; though the user interface had a
number of glitches and problems.

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hengli
"Threat Model

The reason we're even presenting the user with a dialog is because we want to
prevent badge spamming, whereby third-party issuers spam a user's backpack
with badges that they don't want. Consequently, we need the backpack to ask
for the user's consent. This will be accomplished via an iframe embedded in
the issuer's page.

The only sensitive information that a user needs to enter in this flow is
login credentials. Since authentication is done via BrowserID, which opens in
a pop-up window, the consequences of spoof attacks are minimal–so long as the
user knows to look at domain names in their address bar and BrowserID's UI."

I was really interested until I got to this part. Asking the user for
permission each time I want to award a badge? Complete fail. Mozilla doesn't
get UI.

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AndrewDucker
Allowing providers to spam me with badges - complete fail.

I may well be interested in having you award me _a_ badge, but that doesn't
mean I want you cluttering things up whenever you feel like it.

Mozilla's policy is that the user has control over their data, and I fully
support that.

~~~
hengli
This is going to be more of a pain in the ass than Vista's Security popup or
whatever it's called. It'll be the #1 way to make users hate using your
application, I assure you.

Badges need to enhance the application not interrupt it. I have never seen a
badge application pause the application to award you with the badge. The
entire concept is pretty nuts. It's a good idea, such a shame about the
implementation.

Mozilla can easily provide an interface to delete badges you don't want, or
ban applications that spam you from the badge system. The whole threat model
idea is just self-sabotage.

