Badge is a technological open standard, initiated by Mozilla Foundation (OBI - Open Badges Infrastructure) and developed by an active international community. The Open Badge standard is used all over the world in the most different organizations.

Open Badges look like images, readable by every computer, but those images also contain metadata about the competencies that each specific badge represents and about the person that owns it. Every badge is unique and, if read by a system that supports OBI, tells the story of its owner: 

• name and surname, 
• the date of acquisition, 
• the competency that it represents, in which way this competency has been acquired and assessed,
• who assessed it and, in case, for how long that competency is valid. All verifiable in real time from every system supporting OBI.

An Open Badge has a strong communication power due to the visual component represented by the image. An Open Badge is portable because any system supporting the standard can read its metadata: thus it can be verified by calling upon the platform who issued it.