Marco Bani and Stefano De Paoli
infrastructural layer that offers facilities for issuing and sharing badges in the large social media ecosystem based on OpenApi.
These initiatives have had a significant impact on the development of the concept of digital badges. Among other things they have been able to provide a solid socio‐technical framework for the design and deployment of digital badges systems. In particular, they formalized several key concepts, indispensable for building an effective badge system:
• the( badge) issuer: as the entity awarding the badge to receivers( e. g. informal learners), which also decides what are the rules / actions upon which reputation and badges are awarded.
• the receiver / earner: as the person / entity receiving the badge from the issuer.
• the displayer: a third party platform which is open to display badges that conform with the OpenBadge standard.
• the ecosystem: all the people or other platforms that will recognize badging systems.
• the metadata: metadata should be attached to the badge as a way to track the actions‐activities that lead to the awarding of the badge.
7.1 Civic badges
Our position is that digital badges can constitute the kernel of a reputation system for civic initiatives fostering e‐democracy. To this end a civic media badge framework could be deployed. The outcomes of the Mozilla OpenBadge and DMLCompetition can be leveraged for achieving this goal. Besides, some civic media platforms such as Ushahidi( Figure 1) are already starting using badge system to track achievements and foster engagement. Therefore, it would be wise to take advantage of a concept( i. e. digital badge) already being used by leading digital civics initiatives.
Figure 1: The ushahidi digital badges pack http:// ushahidi. github. com / Badges /
In our view, a badge framework should have some basic features in order to tailor badge systems for civic initiatives. These features are somehow context ‐independent:
• aesthetic characteristics based on principles of " Visual Semiotic ";
• graphical features in order to build the graphical look and feel of badges;
• based on established User Experience( UX) patterns;
• able to represent in a granular way civic achievements;
• with a focus on portability of graphical representations;
• supported by the Mozilla Open infrastructure Badge.
7.2 The civic badges Issuers
Digital civics platforms, in our model, are the primary issuers of digital badges. There are several civic media platforms and a civic badge framework should work towards a unified model. Several model can be foreseen to achieve this goal:
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