This project is a new and digital innovating way of tackling the problems that exists in the recognition of Previously Acquired Competences, an existing longer running project. We do this by introducing the digital Open Standard of Open Badges & actively supporting the Open Badges community in spreading this standard not only as outcomes of learning experiences but also as entry point in a labor market & building blocks of a digital CV or resume.

It is unique to do this kind of innovation from within government & with the perspective on the labor market application of Open Badges. From day 1 this was setup as an ongoing open source community effort and several open meetups were and still are being organised to get anyone involved who are interested to help out on this (both within gov as outside, both private/public organisations as individuals/users). For this we initiated an open meetup group and open slack channel and are actively participating and contributing to the worldwide Open Badges community.

Improvements & a redesign of the tool has been started in the summer of 2017, following up on the release of the 2.0 version of the Open Badges Standard in March 2017. This is being done as an open source community effort initialized with a project (http://escobadges.eu/) at the Summer of Code organised by Open Knowledge Belgium (http://2017.summerofcode.be/) & hosted at Selor.

From the start of the project a bottom-up, we used an open approach. We didn't start with formal partnerships and collaboration but with open meetups and events, capturing bottom up interest from others (both inside as outside the organisation) & allowing anyone to collaborate on this.

We became active in the international Open Badges community & connected to different organisations already working on badges worldwide. Sharing knowledge and expertise in the spirit of open innovation & open source philosophy. Top down & Bottom up approach were connected in Belgium after the first POC & the Be Badges website was developed. The Be Badges website was developed by a start-up & with the same mindset & processes as start-ups work. Within an experimental ilabs environment & not via our regular IT environment. By using an Open philosophy & Open Linked Data, collaboration is facilitated and formal partnerships are replaced by open collective efforts with a common goal of spreading Open Badges.

In 2016 the website Be Badges was deliberately launched too early & in beta-version to early capture interest, feedback & support of users. We presented our project at several national and international events. Feedback & community support was gathered via social media accounts (twitter, facebook, linkedin) & an open meetup group for in-person meetings. Users are considered as co-developers & partners in helping spreading open badges. In 2017 the community launched as a working group within Open Knowledge Foundation Belgium & with Selor as one of the members co-operating on this. So the Federal Belgian government in the role of initiator & facilitator of a community that is further spreading Open Badges in Belgium. This kind of setup, makes it a cooperative & collective effort with open access for everyone who wants to support the same goal & ongoing effort of spreading this Open Standard in Belgium.

Selor launched the platform to answer following challenges:

* Getting rid of (useless) retests: so candidates don’t always have to invest in performing identical or similar tests (especially PC tests that measure generic competencies). Employers can save money by not needing to test candidates again. We got impact here with badges issued by Selor & used by the City of Ghent to dispense candidates from a first selection phase, letting them enter directly into a 2nd stage based on competence test results at Selor, proven by badges.

* enhancing talent mobility: Only formal degrees or diplomas are accepted in many cases (especially within context of comparative government examinations). Recruiting, screening & also promotions are not always as skill-based as they should be. Here we see badges as a digital innovation in the area of "Previously Acquired Competences", shifting the focus from ‘diplomas-only’ to broader entry possibilities with also skills acquired elsewhere (lifelong learning, experience,...). * talent mismatch & employability: the use of structured linked open data within the Open Badges Standard & the fact they can be linked to frameworks like the European ESCO taxonomy, makes it possible to have a better future job seeker - job matching. Be Badges offers value to all types of users: * Issuers: are now in a position to get more evidence based certification. They can digitally manage their certification path and replace paper certification processes. * Earners: Can digitally manage & share badges with evidence-based information and use badges as building blocks of their CV & on social media. Share them with possible future employers & gain access to more & better matched job opportunities. * Displayers: Can save time & money by awarding value to a badge. e.g. the use-case of badges to prevent useless retesting (badges can have an expiration date, which makes them more flexible for competences or skills that need re-assessment over time).

The main challenges were:

- technical implementation: getting the correct people on board that understand the working of Open Linked Data principles & could help put this into a working application

- technical understanding: explaining the usefulness of an Open technical inter-operability standard to a non-technical audience (e.g. also to management levels, policy makers,..)

- save guarding of the project's Open & User-centric approach. Making sure there is no 'ownership' but a de-centralised, open sourced approach in spreading the standard.

- Getting everyone to understand that the application being built is never really finished but continuously being improved, which has an impact on ongoing efforts needed. Contacts & help offered by technical skilled community members (e.g. within Open Knowledge foundation) & communication expertise helped tackling these challenges.

Since the application grew from a bottom up approach, it is necessary to have an organisational culture & IT development environment which doesn't obstruct but facilitates this. Since a lot of open source tools & basic cloud-hosting services come with a very low or sometimes even no financial cost, budget is not the biggest issue. And maybe even an obstruction to an open source development process, since budget brings in more time spend on administration & more commercial interests into the development.

An open source community effort based on volunteers and internal motivation (and not on financial motives) could be a more solid base to built on for long-going continuous development & improvement. Budget and the presence of payed human resources working full time on it, helps of course and is necessary to go from a POC to a full grown application, but my believe is that budget alone can not built a community to spread an Open Standard like Open Badges.

Since Open Badges are an Open Standard, every organisation facing the same challenges can assess if Open Badges could bring a solution to those challenges. Everyone is free to implement this and built together on a bigger network of inter-operable open badges & open badge applications. Open badges as building blocks of online resumes (linkedin, europass, etc. ), against diploma fraud, and as a tool for open recognition of verifiable skills across countries (e.g. recognition of refugee skills) are all use cases being developed within the international Open Badges community.

My personal experience is that opening up processes, meetings and adapting an open source philosophy for this project helped enormously to bring in the best expertise without spending a big budget. By following an open source philosophy, we got some fast results and managed to build a community surrounding this. The lessons we learned is that this process goes with ups and downs. An application built in this way is not from a first release as qualitative solid or reliable as some other governmental applications following a more classical approach, which needs to be understand by all of your users.