Well Nate, it is not just a noble idea, but a very practical one. A registry doesn't have to be centralised, it should be networked, so an organisation could have it's own registry within a federation of registries.
If you take a standard like Common Core, it doesn't make sense that each badge issuer copy/paste the content of the common core standard into the many different badges they will issue. In doing so, one vital piece of information is lost: if badges where referring to a common core registry, that means that we could use the unique identifier (a pointer to the definition) to do many different things, like establishing a map of all the badges delivered in relation to a specific competency, but also many different maps of all the other data/services making reference to the same competency. Letting each institution copy/paste the common core standard into their many idiosyncratic databases will simply loose that information. Of course, within a federation of registries, an institution could decide to improve/rewrite/expand/restrict the CC standard.
As I am very much a proponent of the self-designed badges, I would include the badges themselves within that federation of registries. We could imagine a service identical to the Mozilla backpack that would act as a registry for individual, idiosyncratic criteria. In fact, we are not very far from it. Today, only issued badges are pushed into backpacks. Now imagine that, instead of pushing assigned badges, 'empty' badges were pushed into the backpack. This would be very close to a registry. Now, without changing anything we could 'interpret' the metadata relative to the issuer as the 'badge designer'.
I understand that a number of people are working on the federation of backpacks. Well, that wouldn't require much work to concurrently work on a federation of registries.
As you see, at no time things are taken away from the hands of the issuer and earner. We are just providing another opportunity to create more meaning.
IMO, we shouldn't worry about the translation itself, but simply create the conditions to make it possible. As for the trust issue, it is precisely what badges are great at: I'll never repeat enough that badges are foremost a criteria-evidence-based trust relationship. We could perfectly well use this trust relationship as evidence (or authorisation) for translation. Once again, this is not rocket science :-)
Serge
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