What actually makes a digital credential trustworthy to an employer, a learner, a verifier, or a system? What technologies and human processes support trust? This interactive session combines a fun "broken credential" activity with small-group conversations where participants work through real trust challenges drawn from their own experience. No technical background required.
PurposeThis session is designed to surface the questions that matter most to participants about trust in digital credentialing -- and send those questions into the main conference where they can be explored across sessions over three days.
Rather than delivering content, we are creating the conditions for participants to shape their own learning agenda. The session has three parts: a shared foundation (framing) + an experiential activity (broken credential game) + reflection (generating questions to take into the conference).
Participants leave with:
- A shared vocabulary for talking about trust across layers of the credentialing ecosystem
- At least one question they generated themselves, grounded in their own work
Who This Is ForAnyone attending Badge Summit with an interest in trust, verification, transparency, or the infrastructure that makes credentials meaningful -- regardless of technical background. No prior knowledge of CTDL, machine-readable data, or credential standards is required.
Session Flow1. Welcome and Trust Stack Framing (~15 minutes)Jeanne and Deb open with a short, conversational introduction to the "trust stack" -- the layers of trust that make a credential meaningful:
- Issuer identity: is this a real, legitimate organization?
- Learner identity: did this specific person actually earn this?
- Credential description: is what it claims clear and meaningful?
- Skill alignment: are the competencies machine-readable and connected to shared frameworks?
- Verification: can anyone check this independently?
- Portability: does it travel across systems without losing its meaning?
This is not a lecture. The goal is to give everyone a shared vocabulary before the activity, not to explain how any of it works technically. The animating question for the session:
Where does trust actually break down -- and what would it take to fix it?2. The Broken Credential Game (~20 minutes)Everyone uses a set of printed credential cards -- fictional badges issued to fictional people from fictional issuers. The cards vary deliberately:
- Some are rich: machine-readable skill alignments, issuer verification, evidence links, competency descriptions
- Some are thin: a title and a description field, nothing more
- Some are broken: the issuer no longer exists, the skill alignment points to a dead URL, learner identity is unverifiable
The activity: Participants circulate and try to "hire" each other based only on what is on a credential card. No side conversations, no context -- just the card.
3. Reflection (~15 minutes): We come back together and ask one question:What made you trust it -- or not?The reflection is not about what the "right" answers are. It is a way for participants to name what they just experienced, in their own words, before they formulate questions to take into the conference.
Each participant writes down at least one question-- something the game surfaced for them that they want to explore with others. Prompts to offer if people get stuck:
- What broke in the game, and why did it matter?
- What is the hardest trust problem you face in your own work?
- What would you need to understand better to make credentials more trustworthy?
There are no wrong answers. This is not a test. The stickier and more specific the question, the better the follow-up discussion it will generate.
Connecting to the ConferenceThe questions generated in this session are meant to travel. Here are a few ways to make that happen:
Carry specific questions into the conference sessions and ask them out loud.
