We are more than our metadata

I love going to conferences where, over the course of a few days, ideas start to come together.

You spend months immersed in your own work, then suddenly find yourself surrounded by hundreds of people grappling with many of the same questions. You compare notes, challenge assumptions, hear different perspectives and, if you’re lucky, leave with your thinking just a little different from when you arrived.

That was Badge Summit for me this year.

As expected, there were plenty of conversations about badges, wallets, learner records, metadata and interoperability. These are the foundations that make digital credentials possible, and every year the conversations become a little more practical as the technology and standards continue to mature.

What struck me this year, though, was that the discussion seemed to have shifted. Rather than focusing on the technology itself, people kept returning to a much simpler question.

How do we create recognition that is genuinely useful to people?

I found myself asking exactly the same question in my own session, Good Badge, Bad Badge.

It was a practical workshop about badge design, evidence and implementation, built around a simple premise: a good badge is a badge that is useful.

As we explored examples together, I realised we kept coming back to one question.

Who is this badge actually for?

It’s easy to become absorbed in designing a technically perfect credential. We can debate metadata fields, evidence links, visual design and standards compliance. All of those things matter. But a good badge isn’t simply one that meets a specification, it’s one that is useful to the person who receives it.

If the learner understands what it represents, feels confident sharing it and can use it to tell a richer story about their capabilities, then the badge has done something meaningful. If they can’t, it doesn’t matter how elegant the metadata is.

Throughout the week, I found myself returning to one sentence:

We are more than our metadata.

I used the phrase during the session, and afterwards it found its way back into conversations. People would refer to it as we discussed learner records, trust, interoperability or recognition. It seemed to capture something many of us had been thinking about.

The irony isn’t lost on me. I’ve spent much of my career advocating for richer metadata, stronger standards and better evidence. I know how important those foundations are. Metadata helps recognition travel. Standards create trust. Interoperability allows learning to move across institutions, employers and countries.

But none of those things define the person behind the credential.

I’m not suggesting those things are unimportant, quite the opposite. Without them, we cannot build the recognition ecosystems we are all working towards. But they are the infrastructure, not the purpose. If we focus on them we are the tail wagging the dog.

Once I started looking through that lens, I began noticing the same theme everywhere.

Keisha Katz shared the ongoing work of Reel Works, where digital credentials are helping young people recognise strengths they often struggle to articulate themselves. The badges matter, but the confidence they create matters even more.

Kelly Page explored a very different question: what happens when credentials cause harm? Her work examines issues such as surveillance, consent, exclusion and platform dependency. It was a timely reminder that technology is never neutral. The systems we build shape people’s experiences, which is why thoughtful design matters just as much as technical capability. I’ll be writing more about Kelly’s work in the coming weeks because I think it deserves a much deeper conversation.

Later in the week I joined the Global Perspectives panel with Simone Ravaioli (Italy), Daniel Flores (Alaska) and Tomás Mindlin (Argentina). One of the things I always enjoy about these conversations is the opportunity to compare how different countries are approaching similar challenges.

At one point Noah Geisel asked the panel whether we were using Learner Employment Records, or LERs. We all answered, “No.” It was fascinating to watch the reaction in the room.

For many people, particularly those working in the United States, the LER has become such a significant part of the conversation that it is easy to assume it is the direction everyone is heading. That simple exchange highlighted something quite different. Outside the US, many countries are solving the same recognition challenges in other ways.

To me, that’s one of the greatest strengths of international conversations. They remind us that our own experience is only one perspective. Every education system, labour market and policy environment is different, so it makes sense that different solutions will emerge.

It also reinforced something I’ve believed for a long time. I much prefer talking about good practice than best practice.

Best practice suggests there is a single model that everyone should aspire to.

Good practice recognises that different contexts need different approaches. The value comes from learning from one another, challenging our assumptions and adapting ideas in ways that make sense locally.

Perhaps interoperability isn’t only about technology. Perhaps it’s also about our willingness to learn across borders while respecting that there is more than one path forward.

That challenge came into sharp focus during discussions about countries such as South Africa, where millions of learner achievements and thousands of qualifications remain scattered across disconnected systems. The question isn’t simply how to issue more credentials. It’s how to unlock recognition that already exists but remains trapped inside silos.

And then there was another question that surfaced repeatedly throughout the week.

Once a credential has been issued, how does anyone actually use it?

Nate Otto’s work on the LER Skills Verifier tackles that challenge from the employer’s perspective. We’ve become much better at issuing digital credentials. The next step is helping employers understand, verify and make meaningful use of them.

As I travelled home, I reflected these aren’t separate conversations. They are all different expressions of the same idea. Every discussion eventually circled back to the people:

• The learner trying to make sense of their own capabilities.

• The educator wanting recognition to have genuine educational value.

• The employer looking for trustworthy evidence.

• The policymaker trying to create systems that work at scale.

The technology underpins all of it, but it is the human purpose gives it meaning.

Perhaps that is what has changed most over the past few years. We’re no longer asking whether digital credentials have a future. Increasingly, we’re asking how they contribute to something much bigger.

• How do they help people understand what they know?

• How do they help them communicate what they can do?

• How do they make learning, in all its forms, more visible throughout a lifetime?

For me those are far more interesting questions and perhaps we are circling back to the original intent of Open Badging, recognition for learning regardless of where or how it happened. And now that we have better tools, using that recognition to tell our own stories. Perhaps that is why my little sentence resonated so strongly throughout the week.

We are more than our metadata.

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