Inside the Badge Summit 2024 with CU Boulder's Noah Geisel

This year, the T3 Innovation Network is excited to hold our Mid-Year Meeting in conjunction with the Badge Summit in Boulder, Colorado, which we're proud to sponsor. The T3 Network is a public-private initiative led by the Foundation that aims to improve information sharing in the job market, with a focus on equity and opportunity for all. 

I recently spoke with Noah Geisel, Micro-Credentials Program Manager at the University of Colorado Boulder, about this unique event. The Badge Summit brings together innovators, educators, and industry leaders to shape the future of digital credentials and skills-based hiring. It's the perfect venue for our T3 Network to engage with the broader community, explore cutting-edge tools, and collaboratively tackle the challenges of our evolving talent marketplace. 

For those who are unfamiliar with the Badge Summit at CU Boulder, can you please share an introduction?

Way back when badging was first getting started, there were a lot of people in “White Paper Land” and only a few of us in “Execution Land.” We started weekly Twitter chats in which an international cadre of people eagerly swapped ideas with like-minded folks through #BadgeChat, then after a couple of years we decided to host an in-person gathering.

We had an intersection year one that included K-12 EdTechies, gamification geeks, Higher Ed researchers, early industry leaders from the likes of Salesforce and IBM, and even one of the creators of Oregon Trail.

Badge Summit was born as this community convening hyper-focused on belonging and support. It organically dispensed with the pomp and focused on the circumstance.

Now in its 9th year, it is regarded as one of the places for thought leadership about credential innovation, while also maintaining its inviting, community-oriented approach. We curate a gathering where attendees can learn about best practices from successful implementations and dive deep into failures and the stuff that didn’t work so they can take away lessons learned.

What are some of the big initiatives that the Badge Summit is working on this year?

For the first time, the Badge Summit has a theme: “It takes an ecosystem.” After a decade of studying awesome badging efforts, I’ve realized that there’s a low ceiling on what any initiative can accomplish in a silo. The most promising work to make positive impact at scale share a common trait of intentional interconnectedness.

You’ve heard the expression, “It takes a village.” For micro-credentials, digital badges, and LERs, my new mantra is “it doesn’t take a village; it takes an ecosystem.” We’ve curated programming that embeds this ethos, hoping people who aren’t already thinking about ecosystems leave the Badge Summit obsessing over the different nodes in their immediate ecosystems and what they can do to make connections and build things that will last and make a difference.

This year, you’ll be hosting the T3 Network’s Mid-Year Meeting in conjunction with the Badge Summit at CU Boulder. Why does it make sense to host the meeting with the Badge Summit?

There is a lot of overlap in the attendee profile, so the collaboration hopefully cuts down on redundancies and extra work travel in the summer. The Badge Summit attracts a ton of passionate innovators and change makers who are leading and shaping the future of this stuff in their communities, but maybe aren’t aware of the awesome work of the T3 Network.

Industry stakeholders have a responsibility to be involved, lend their expertise, and share their resources. The T3 Network exemplifies this. It’s important that Badge Summit attendees know about these contributions and invitations to collaboration. T3 is leading some really cool, cutting-edge efforts to make an impact, and I’m excited for our communities to collide as the first step in fostering an ecosystem is gaining familiarity with who else is in the same ecosystem.

What can attendees expect when they register for the Badge Summit?

Coffee all day! Seriously, though, expect an attendee responsive gathering with dozens of sessions, plus the virtual Badge Summit two weeks later will include over 20 live and recorded sessions. This year, we stepped up our game with breakfasts, lunches, receptions and yes, coffee. Learning is encouraged in informal settings of hallway couches just as much as formal settings like the plenary sessions. They can expect a concious event that embraces risk-taking to meet people where they are. It’s better to fail while trying to do something meaningful than to blandly offer predictable and mediocre opportunities for learning and sharing.

T3 Network and the Badge Summit are in alignment on many topics, including fostering a strong network community. What are some of the ways in which participants can get involved as attendees at the Badge Summit?

The Badge Summit was a community before we were a conference, and it’s maintained the welcoming vibe of a community. We hope that people immediately feel a part of something, that they belong at Badge Summit, and they are empowered to help shape the community’s direction and growth. Sometimes people get involved by asking what they can do, though the more common trend is to see a need and just volunteer to support it, whether that’s front-of-house contributions like making cool designs and writing up interviews with presenters, or back-of-house stuff like helping with daunting task of building the schedule matrix.

For many, the digital credentialing ecosystem may feel daunting to address, and both the Badge Summit and T3 Network are focused on demystifying that mindset. What advice would you give to those who are just beginning their journey in this space?

I’ve been deep into this world for over a decade, and my mom is only just now figuring out what I do for a living. That’s a huge problem! We are guilty of “overindexing” on our explanations and making this stuff too complicated. My advice to the newcomers: ignore us when we don’t make sense and disregard feelings of imposter syndrome or of being way behind the herd. Despite the complicated terminology and technology, this is really about recognition and storytelling. I think of it like holistic human highlight reels: We’re harnessing the power of trusted credentials to recognize and tell stories of how awesome people are as learners and achievers. The potential impact of connecting opportunities with opportunity-seekers is nothing short of changing the world!

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Taylor Hansen

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Noah Geisel