Contributing
These are some things that still need to be planned out in the OpenBadges specification. This is less code and more planning/brainstorming, though the plans/brainstorms could certainly lead to prototypes.
TODO: write these out
Right now the bakery only supports PNGs. It'd be awesome if we could get support for SVG badges. A library to look at, recently released by Adobe, is http://snapsvg.io/.
We want to add a new method to the JavaScript API, OpenBadges.share. Right now the only “easy” method for sharing a badge is several steps long:
- Sign up for persona
- Sign into backpack
- Accept badge
- Go back to backpack
- Create a group
- Create a “portfolio” page for that group
- Share portfolio page.
This is not an intuitive workflow. It would be nice to have a way to provide the issuer with option to let the user share directly from their site that doesn't require a trip through the backpack workflow.
The idea would be that the OpenBadges.share method would take a single badge and upon activation would pop up a page that could have users auth into Twitter or Facebook (it could also give them a pure HTML/JS embed code?) to share directly to those sites.
Ideally the message posted would contain a link back to either the evidence if it exists, falling back to the criteria page if not. There should also be a second link in the message linking to the human readable badge assertion so ownership can be verified.
This is related to (but can be done independently from) the task above. It would be great if the backpack had a public page for pretty-printing OpenBadges.
The badge information would come via query string, either the URL or the signed string. (e.g http://backpack.openbadges.org/view?badge=http://example.org/assertion.json – note that might not be the best route for it) and the page would show the badge image and information in a human readable way.
Even better would be if the page also allowed for ownership verification. Since most badges will have the recipient hashed, a viewer of the page should have some method for typing in the expected identity and seeing if it matches what's in the badge.
When we first started the project, we wanted a path that would get a potential contributor up and running as fast as possible. To that end we created a vagrant recipe that would get people started.
Unfortunately, we've had a lot of trouble supporting it – what works on my machine doesn't necessarily work on other's, even on the same operating system with the same version of vagrant.
Someone needs to go through the current vagrant instructions and see if they work. If they don't, we should just completely rip them out from the README. If they do, I still think they should be deemphasized (i.e., don't call it “the easy way”) and the manual setup instructions should be given priority.
Our README is pretty long and could use a once-over to make sure it's in good shape.
We haven't had a concerted cleanup of our wiki in a long time. It'd be great to go through, remove all of the out-of-date documentation, make sure all of the up-to-date docs are actually up-to-date and make sure the front page (https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges/wiki) is as useful as possible.