Decentralised Badges with BadgeFed: Implementing ActivityPub-based Credentials for Non Profits

A few years ago I volunteered at a non-profit where the go-to digital badge platform (e.g., Credly) was explicitly prohibited due to cost, vendor lock-in and rigid workflows. We needed a badge system for volunteer recognition, skill tracking and event participation — yet the high price and closed ecosystem killed it every time.

This is how BadgeFed was born, an open-source, federated badge system built on the ActivityPub protocol and the Open Badges standard. Because it’s an instance you control, deployable in minutes, fully federated and self-hostable, it overcame the cost/lock-in barrier and unlocked recognition for our volunteer community.

So how do we move digital badges out of locked-down platforms and into the federated social web? In this talk I’ll walk through how BadgeFed, an open-source credentialing system built on the ActivityPub protocol and aligned with the Open Badges spec, powers non-profits to issue, share and verify badges across Fediverse instances.

I will share:

• Why traditional badge systems are brittle and siloed, and how a decentralised model flips that dynamic.
• How BadgeFed implements ActivityPub actors, badge issuance as federated objects, and federated discovery.
• How Community Credentials uses the stack to empower nonprofits and volunteer programs: federated badges that survive issuer shutdowns, open standards, self-hostable instances, social graph integration. communitycredentials.org
• What remains challenging: federation scaling, discovery/search of badges across instances, identity portability, moderation/trust issues.
• Next steps for BadgeFed and federated credentials in the Social Web ecosystem, and how you as a dev or org can pick it up.

Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how to deploy a federated badge service, integrate it with their tools, and contribute to a social-web native credentialing future..

Referentes

• Github repo
• Community Credentials