Open Badges is the name of a group of specifications and open technical standards originally developed by the Mozilla Foundation with funding from the MacArthur Foundation.
The Open Badges standard describes a method for packaging information about accomplishments, embedding it into portable image files as a digital badge, and establishing an infrastructure for badge validation.
The standard was originally maintained by the Badge Alliance Standard Working Group, but transitioned officially to the IMS Global Learning Consortium as of January 1, 2017 - wikipedia 
# Technical Specification
Open Badges are designed to serve a broad range of digital badge use cases, including both academic and non-academic uses.Digital Badges vs. Open Badges The core Open Badge specification is made up of three types of Badge Objects: Assertion, BadgeClass, and IssuerOrganization.
* An Assertion is a representation of an awarded badge, used to share information about a badge belonging to one earner. * A BadgeClass is a collection of information about the accomplishment recognized by the badge. * An IssuerOrganization is a collection of information about the entity or organization issuing the badge.
A set of one of each of these may be constructed into a valid Open Badge. Full technical documentation is available at the Open Badges Technical Specification website.
Since 1.1, Open Badges must be valid JSON-LD. Version 1.1 also adds Extensions, a structure that follows a standard format for collaboratively extending Badge Objects so that any issuer, earner, or consumer can understand the information added to badges. Any issuer may define and publish Extensions to include new types of metadata in badges. Any other issuer may use the same extensions to publish similar information in a mutually recognizable way.Open Badges Extensions
An exploratory prototype draft xAPI (Experience API (Tin Can API)) vocabulary has been defined so that Open Badges may be referenceable from Experience API activity streams.Open Badges xAPI Vocabulary
# See also - Learning Passport