===== Decentralised Badges with BadgeFed: Implementing ActivityPub-based Credentials for Non Profits =====
  * **Speaker**: Maho Pacheco  
  * **Room**: CC 234  
  * **Time**: Sun 11:20 am – 11:50 am  

  * **Format**: Lecture (30 Min + Q&A)  
  * **Difficulty**: Introductory  
  * **Track**: Sustainability & Funding  
  * **Additional Tags**: Education, Self-Hosting  
  * **Presenter Location**: In-person  
  * **Experience**: first time speaking  
  * **At**: at lfnw  

==== Description: ====  
Mainstream digital badge platforms often fail nonprofits and volunteer‑driven communities due to cost, vendor lock‑in, and rigid workflows. **BadgeFed** was created to solve that problem: a fully open‑source, self‑hostable digital badge system built on the **Open Badges standard** and the **ActivityPub protocol**, running as a cross‑platform .NET application on Linux.

This talk explores how digital credentials can move from closed ecosystems into the **federated social web**, enabling organizations to issue, share, and verify badges across the Fediverse. Using BadgeFed as a case study, Maho will walk through:

  * Why traditional badge platforms are brittle and siloed  
  * How BadgeFed implements ActivityPub actors, badge issuance as federated objects, and cross‑instance discovery  
  * Real‑world usage through Community Credentials, empowering nonprofits and volunteer programs with self‑hosted, standards‑based recognition  
  * Current challenges: federation at scale, identity portability, moderation, and trust  
  * What’s next for federated credentials and how organizations can deploy, extend, and contribute  

Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of how to deploy a federated badge service on Linux, integrate it with existing tools, and participate in building a social‑web‑native credentialing ecosystem grounded in open standards and free software.

**Target Audience:**  
  * Nonprofits  
  * Game developers  
  * Educational institutions