Public Badges

Public Badges was developed through the PublicSpaces initiative, a coalition of public-interest organizations committed to reclaiming the internet as a force for the common good. The project brought together concept development, system architecture, design, and community management to create infrastructure for ethical accountability online.

Citizens, organizations, and governments have lost confidence in the ethical commitments of digital platforms and products. Existing approaches to internet ethics tend to impose uniform standards from the top down, which fails to account for the diversity of values across communities and contexts. There was no way to make ethical commitments visible, measurable, and verifiable—and no infrastructure for facilitating genuine discussion about which values matter in which contexts.

Public Badges merged Open Badges technology with automated testing to create an evidence-based certification system. Rather than dictating a single set of values, the system facilitates discussion about value choices within a pluralist landscape. Organizations, products, projects, and protocols can earn badges that make their ethical commitments transparent and measurable. The pilot phase introduced a "Zero Badge" for PublicSpaces Coalition members, establishing a baseline for ethical certification with plans to expand the framework to broader adoption.

Public Badges demonstrated that ethical values can be made operational—not just aspirational—through thoughtful infrastructure design. The system proved that certification doesn't require imposing universal standards; instead, it can create shared frameworks for discussing and measuring diverse value commitments. The project contributed to the broader PublicSpaces mission of reclaiming the internet for the public interest, showing that accountability and pluralism can coexist in digital governance.