An Open Source Diploma in the form of an Electronic Attestation of Attributes: A Proposal

Originally published on LinkedIn on 12 November 2026.

What if skills acquired anywhere could be assessed, certified and independently verified everywhere, without replacing traditional degrees? The first Open Source Diploma is already a reality. Looking for like-minded educators, employers, innovators and digital identity experts to help shape what comes next. Interested in collaborating? Let’s connect!

Abstract. The proposal outlined below, largely inspired by my recent participation on behalf of Evrotrust on the stage of the Digital Trust Forum, organized by Jeroen van Hertum, an ambassador to the Open Source University concept almost a decade ago, and Sander Dijkhuis, one of the masterminds behind the present-day WE BUILD Consortium, concerns the management of learning in the era of microlearning and distributed knowledge, largely driven by the AI revolution: what a person knows, how they came to know it, and how anyone else can trust that claim. It argues that learning, like information before 1989, is scattered across closed systems that do not talk to one another. It proposes a simple, open scheme in which any learning can be linked into a pathway, assessed by people, and recorded as a signed credential that its holder owns. The result is the Open Source Diploma. The first one was issued in November 2026.

Overview

In March 1989 a young engineer at CERN wrote a short proposal about a problem nobody had named. Information was being lost. Not destroyed, simply lost: held in one place, unreachable from another, forgotten when people moved on. His answer was not a bigger database. It was a way to link what already existed. His manager wrote three words on the cover: “Vague but exciting” (Mike Sendall). The World Wide Web followed.

THIS proposal borrows the form of THAT proposal on purpose, because the problem it describes has a twin. Today we lose learning the way CERN lost information. A person reads, builds, fails, teaches and masters things over a lifetime, and almost none of it can be shown. What can be shown is mostly a single folded document from one institution, issued once, years ago.

The aim is not to replace that document. It is to link everything around it.

Losing learning

Consider a typical working life. A school certificate. Perhaps a degree. Then twenty or forty years of courses, projects, apprenticeships, open-source contributions, books read with a pen in hand, mistakes paid for in real money. The degree is verifiable, with effort. Nearly everything after it is not.

The learning is not lost to the person. It is lost to everyone else. An employer cannot see it. A university admitting a mature student cannot weigh it. A community that needs a skill cannot find the neighbour who has it. The person cannot carry it across a border, a sector or a change of employer without starting to explain from zero.

There are three usual reasons:

• Records live with the institution, not with the learner. When the institution closes, merges or forgets, the record goes with it.
• Each institution keeps its own format and its own definition of competence. Nothing joins up.
• Verification costs time. A recruiter who must phone a registrar will usually not bother, and will fall back on the name of the school.

That last habit has a cost. When verification is expensive, reputation replaces evidence. Pedigree stands in for merit. The learner who studied hard outside the right walls is invisible, and the system tells itself this is quality control.

Linked learning

The insight of 1989 was that the value lay in the links, not the nodes. A document becomes more useful the moment something points to it.

Learning works the same way. A course on its own says little. Linked to a project that used it, a mentor who reviewed it, and a second course that built on it, it says a great deal. What matters is the path, and the fact that someone competent walked along it and signed off.

So learning is modelled here as a set of nodes and links:

• Nodes are units of learning from any source: a university module, a free online course, a book, a professional certificate, a piece of published work.
• Links say how they relate: this prepares for that, this replaces that, this was applied in that project.
• A pathway is a chosen route through the nodes towards a stated competence, published openly so anyone can follow, copy or improve it.
• An assessment is a person, accountable by name, confirming that a learner has walked a pathway and can do what it promises.

None of these ideas is new. Nor is the human urge to bring order to chaos. Physics teaches that across the universe as a whole entropy, the measure of disorder, relentlessly grows; life, and human knowledge with it, builds small islands of order by investing energy and work. The Open Source Diploma is a modest attempt at such an island in our scattered knowledge. What is new is that, from this year, the whole path can be walked to the end: from shaping (and reshaping) the pathway under an open licence, through a credential issued to an open but institutionally recognised standard, to its delivery over an open protocol, whether into the European Digital Identity Wallet, which every Member State of the European Union must offer its citizens, or as a plain PDF file that anyone in the world can hold. And the check can be made in seconds, by anyone, for anyone, from anywhere in the world.

The problem with trees

The classical way to organise learning is a tree. Faculty, department, programme, course, lecture. Authority flows down the branches; the diploma is issued at the root. It is an elegant structure and it served for centuries.

But learning does not grow that way. A data engineer may draw on statistics, law, ethics and a weekend course in a programming language no faculty teaches yet. In a tree, each of these sits on a different branch, owned by a different authority, and the person standing between them belongs to none.

Trees also age badly. Adding a new field means building a new branch, which takes committees, accreditation cycles and years. By the time the branch exists, the field has moved. The learner who needed it has already learned it somewhere else, and has nothing to show for it.

A web, by contrast, grows at the edges. Anyone can add a node. Anyone can link to it. Quality emerges from who links, who assesses and who stands behind the result.

The problem with badges

The obvious answer to the tree is to let everyone issue certificates for everything. That has been tried. The result is a flood of digital badges, completion certificates and micro-credentials, most of which certify only that a video was watched to the end.

This fails for the same reason keyword search failed before the Web: abundance without structure is noise. A verifier facing two hundred badges learns less than one facing a single trusted diploma. So the verifier, sensibly, goes back to the diploma.

Badges fail in three particular ways:

• No one is accountable. A platform issued it automatically. No named person put their judgement on the line.
• They do not link. Each badge stands alone, with no account of how it relates to any other.
• They are hard to trust. Many are images or web pages that can be copied, edited or simply disappear with the platform.

The lesson is not that openness fails. It is that openness needs two things the badge economy skipped: a human who assesses, and a signature that can be checked.

A solution: open pathways and the Open Source Diploma

The word university did not first mean a building. The Latin universitas meant a guild: a body of masters and students who governed their own learning. The word diploma comes from the Greek for a paper folded in two: an official document its holder carried on the road. Both ideas were portable, personal and built on trust between people. This proposal restores them, with tools their founders could not have imagined.

The Open Source Diploma works in four steps:

1. A pathway is published. Anyone may propose one: an educator, an employer, a professional community. It lists the learning it draws on, from any provider, and the competence it leads to. It is open: anyone may read it, follow it or fork it.
2. The learner walks it. At their own pace, from any source, paying whomever they choose or no one.
3. A person assesses. A named, accountable reviewer examines the evidence and decides. Not an algorithm. Not a multiple-choice quiz. A human judgement that someone is willing to sign.
4. A credential is issued. The diploma is issued as an electronic attestation of attributes under the European digital identity framework, signed by the issuer, delivered into the learner’s own wallet, and checkable by anyone, anywhere, without asking permission.

“Open source” here means what it means in software. The pathway is public and improvable. The rules of issuance are published in advance. The verification is free. What is not open is the learner’s data: that stays with the learner, who decides what to disclose and to whom.

The diploma does not claim to be a degree. It claims something narrower and, arguably, more useful: that a stated competence was assessed by a named person along a published route. The verifier can judge the rest.

Requirements

The original proposal listed what any workable system must do. This one follows the same discipline.

• Remote access across borders. A credential issued in Sofia must be checkable in Lisbon or Toronto, by anyone with a phone, with no account and no fee.
• Heterogeneity. Learning comes from universities, companies, communities, libraries and kitchen tables. The scheme must accept all of them as sources and privilege none.
• Non-centralisation. No single body owns the catalogue of pathways or the right to assess. Many issuers can follow the same open rules. The scheme must survive the failure of any one of them, including the one that started it.
• Access to existing credentials. Learners already hold diplomas, certificates and transcripts. The scheme must link to them, not ask people to start again.
• Private disclosure. The holder decides what to reveal. A verifier who needs to know a competence does not need the holder’s age or citizenship, and should not get them by default: attributes like these must never decide anyone’s access to learning or the recognition of it.
• Live status. A credential can be suspended or revoked, and a verifier must see that at the moment of checking, not years later.
• Human accountability. Every diploma carries the judgement of a person who can be named and who answers for it.

And, as importantly, what is not required:

• It is not a degree, and does not pretend to be one.
• It does not replace universities. Many will issue pathways and assess on them; ideally, they will.
• It needs no new ledger, no token and no blockchain. Existing public standards suffice.

Specific applications

Among the uses Tim Berners-Lee foresaw for his system was a modest one: a personal skills inventory, so that people could find who knew what. Thirty-seven years later, that application is still waiting. Here is how the Open Source Diploma serves it.

The learner. A self-taught developer in a small town has built real systems for a decade. She follows a published pathway, submits her work, and is assessed by a named reviewer. She receives a diploma in her wallet and can present it to an employer in another country the same afternoon, sharing her competence and nothing more.

The employer. A firm hiring for a scarce skill stops filtering by university name. It publishes the pathway it actually needs, invites candidates to walk it, and verifies the results in seconds. Its hiring becomes faster, cheaper and fairer, all at once.

The educator. A teacher with a good course but no accreditation office links it into an open pathway. Her course now counts towards something a learner can carry. Good teaching is recognised wherever it happens.

The institution. A university publishes pathways from its own modules, opens assessment to learners who studied elsewhere, and reaches people its admissions office never would. Its reputation now rests on the quality of its judgement, which is where it always should have rested.

The community. A professional association, a guild in the old sense, defines what competence means in its field and assesses its own. Standards are set by those closest to the work.

The state of the art

In 1989 the hard part was the network. Today the hard part has already been built, by others, in public.

• The wallet. Regulation (EU) No 910/2014, as amended by Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, requires every Member State to offer its citizens a European Digital Identity Wallet. It is free for natural persons, under the holder’s sole control, and accepted across the Union.
• The attestation. The same Regulation defines electronic attestations of attributes: signed statements about a person, issued into the wallet and checkable by any relying party. A diploma is the textbook example.
• The standards. The formats and procedures are public and open: selective-disclosure credentials that reveal only what the holder chooses, status lists for revocation, and European technical standards for issuers. Anyone can implement them.
• The pilots. Large-scale European pilots, among them WE BUILD, are testing educational and professional credentials across borders now.

Issuing such attestations is itself a trust service under the European regulation for electronic identification, authentication and trust services (eIDAS), and whoever issues them is therefore a trust service provider: a regulated role, with rules, obligations and supervision. That is the role the Foundation takes on. Think of it as a notary for learning: it does not dictate the content of the knowledge it attests, but provides the service the digital age needs most, shared trust.

What was missing was not technology. It was a simple, open scheme that says what an assessed competence is, who may vouch for it, and how. That is the gap the Open Source Diploma fills. The rulebook and the policy and practice statement are published, so that others can check the work, copy it and do better.

Accessing existing credentials

The early Web succeeded partly because it did not demand that the world convert first. It could read what already existed. A new system that requires everyone to change at once is a system nobody adopts.

The same holds here. Wallets will take years to reach every pocket and every human resources department. So each Open Source Diploma also comes as a signed PDF document: printable, attachable to an e-mail, readable on any computer, and still verifiable through its electronic seal and trusted time stamp. The holder chooses which optional details it shows.

The paper copy is the gateway; the wallet is the destination. Neither excludes the other. A learner can frame one and present the other, and the verifier gets the same trustworthy answer from both.

Conclusion: a practical project

Higher education has become, in places, a closed loop. Institutions accredit one another, rank one another and admit those already ranked well. Costs rise and, in the AI era, the meaning of a diploma confined to academic years and a campus thins, yet it remains the only key to many doors. Few people, of any political view, believe that is how it should be. Fewer believe tearing it down would help.

This proposal does neither. It keeps what was always good in the old institution: the guild of people who know, judging the work of those who learn, and standing behind that judgement by name. It adds what the old institution never had: a record the learner owns, a path anyone can see, and a check anyone can run.

The principles behind it are old ones. Most traditions share them; thinkers have already stated them clearly.

• Society grows; it is not assembled. Edmund Burke saw society as a living thing that develops over generations, not a machine to be taken apart and rebuilt to a blueprint. The Open Source Diploma follows that grain. It replaces nothing. It grows at the edges of what exists and keeps what works.
• Experience over theory. Institutions earn trust by surviving the test of time. So does evidence. A diploma that rests on work actually done, judged by people who know the field, is closer to lived experience than any ranking.
• People are imperfect, so trust needs structure. Neither learners nor assessors are angels. That is why every diploma carries a named, accountable person and a signature anyone can check, and why the rules are published before anyone applies them.
• Real talent shows itself. Differences in ability are real, and they emerge in work rather than in titles. The task is to recognise them where they arise, not to confer them by position.
• Each generation is a steward. Burke called society a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born. Open pathways are a commons in that spirit: built on what earlier teachers left, improved, and handed on.

Merit should count more than pedigree. A person’s achievements belong to that person. Standards are best set by the communities closest to the work. And the future is better met with confidence than with fear.

This is not a plan awaiting funding. The first Open Source Diploma was issued in November 2026 as an electronic attestation of attributes, ready for the European Digital Identity Wallet. The rules are public at opensourceuni.org.

This is an invitation to educators to publish pathways, to employers to state the competences they need, to assessors to lend their names, and to learners to walk the road. The web of information took a few years to grow from one proposal. The web of learning can start today.