Interoperability, identity and the future of digital credentials: A conversation with Nate Otto

For Skybridge Skills founder Nate Otto, the story of how he entered the digital credentials space begins in an unlikely place: a courthouse, drinking bad coffee while waiting for jury duty to be dismissed. As he scrolled Twitter, something caught his attention. “I saw Open Badges be invented in real time,” recalled Otto. “People were meeting in a bar in Barcelona on the side of the Mozilla Festival (which was called Drumbeat at the time), and I was immediately excited about the idea.”

What resonated with Otto most was the potential to apply gaming-style achievements to real-life learning and achievement. “You could use these little visual symbols of accomplishment and actually apply it to your real life, potentially use them for professional accomplishments and employment,” said Otto.

That moment set him on a path that has now spanned more than 13 years in the field of digital credentialing. He began by joining Mozilla’s weekly community calls and soon took on a research role at Indiana University, studying Open Badges with Dr. Daniel Hickey at Indiana University. What he learned there impacted the rest of his career: “My personal outcome of that learning was that people have these great ideas for what they want to do with this technology, but they don’t have very good software,” said Otto.

To solve that problem, Otto joined Concentric Sky and helped launch Badgr. At Concentric Sky, Otto led the Badgr project for eight years, growing the team from one to 50 people. Eventually the company sold to Instructure, where the product continues as Parchment Award. At the same time, he immersed himself in the standards community, helping build what he calls a “decentralized ecosystem” across vendors, institutions and open-source contributors.

“The most important part…is to just get started.”

After years of watching institutions begin their digital credentialing journeys, Otto has a clear message about where to focus: don’t overthink it.

“Probably the most important part of getting started is to just get started,” said Otto. Too often, institutions get stuck in “design-by-committee” before issuing anything at all.

He encourages teams to begin with something simple: “Pick a product off the shelf and use it in the way it is intended to be used.” Starting on the less formal end of the learning spectrum builds internal knowledge and helps institutions understand what comes next.

And issuing is only half the equation. Otto said that institutions should also practice being verifiers: “Don’t just issue credentials — talk about your strategy for how you’re going to accept them, as well.” His advice is to “put yourself in the chair of the employer who is evaluating these records” and learn firsthand what verification feels like.

When institutions want their credentials to matter, he says, the answer is surprisingly simple: “If you want credentials to have value, give them value.”

A fragmented ecosystem and real progress

The question of where learners store their credentials is, as Otto said, is a complicated one. “Users actually don’t have a whole lot of options,” he explains, because they usually end up with whatever wallet integrates with the issuing platform their institution chose.

Still, he sees momentum building. “We’re moving toward a world where there is broader interoperability…and there’s been some really good progress just this year.” But he’s also realistic about the current reality: “This space is developing rapidly. We're still not at the part of this journey where the typical user has any credentials at all. Most humans out there in the world do not have digital credentials provisioned,” said Otto. “We have a lot of work to do to get to this imagined situation where life-long and life-wide learning is recognized through common formats by dozens of organizations and individuals that someone interacts with in the course of their life, and that they're gathering all these into one spot.”

To get there, Otto believes standards must continue to get easier and more affordable for vendors to implement and value must grow on the verifier side. “We’ve got to create some demand for credentials that draws them into employers, a real economic opportunity for holders.”

Reflecting on more than a decade of work, Otto sees both the distance left to travel and the progress already made. “We’re not as far along as some of us hoped,” he admitted, “but we have made a lot of progress, and we have a lot of momentum.” With more issuers, more products and the evolution of Open Badges 3.0, Otto added “we’re getting to the point where the rubber is meeting the road.”

What’s next: interoperability profiles and identity registries

Looking ahead, Otto said the next few years are crucial: “We’ve got to deliver now, in the next year or two, on making it real to move credentials across the various flows they need to move through.”

He believes the future depends on vendors aligning around shared interoperability profiles. “We need ecosystems that have chosen the same exact set of options,” explained Otto, because that will give learners “more choice over which wallets they place credentials in and more ability to gather credentials from multiple sources.”

Trust also depends on identity. “One of the biggest things that gets in the way is technical interoperability barriers that block the credential from getting to the employer,” he says. Issuer identity registries, including the work happening in the TLN, will be essential. Without them, learners end up carrying not just their credentials, but the burden of articulating them: “The onus is heavily on the learner, not only to deliver the credential, but to explain what it is,” added Otto.

Closing the gaps

Otto explained that the path to a fully connected ecosystem starts with two core problems: issuer identity registries and delivery protocols between systems. Getting issuers, wallets and verifiers to implement the same protocols and to test them together is key.

“There’s some really important technical work happening right now,” he said, “and vendors need to get connected, test their software with one another, and show success.”