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Schemas in this repo are for verifiable credentials in the areas of skilling, education, and work/job mostly (we may add some adjacencies as well). These implementations fully leverages W3C VC specs and whenever possible reuses or derives from globally available schemas. Given India's large and diverse needs, these are adapted for that purpose to provide clarity to implementers. These specifications are created by the Sunbird OSS community and used in India in various domains such as education, skilling, and work.
The academic and skilling ecosystem is a complex arena with a number of frictions preventing an optimal supply and demand equilibrium, resulting in the inability to access learning and job opportunities. These frictions include low trust, information asymmetry, low ability to compare, costly verification procedures, and portability amongst many others. In the jobs and skills arena, individuals face great difficulties in showcasing their skills and exchanging credentials in a trusted manner. Currently prospective employers or job matching platforms cannot easily digitally review a large batch of candidates’ certificates at scale without the physical presence of the candidates. In addition, authenticity of any of the certificates issued within the skills ecosystem is not verifiable giving rise to fake certificates and fraud.
| Paper Certificate | Digital Credential | |
|---|---|---|
Verification + Trust |
Difficult, low trust | Instant, permanent, online + offline verification. Non-tamperable, so high trust |
Review & Acceptance |
Human evaluation | Machine readable, enabling comparisons across candidates at scale |
Detail & Context on Standards Achieved |
Minimal or difficult to access universally | Always issued based on published standards which share required contextual standards & information |
Presentation |
Physical presence of an ‘original’ copy required | Replicable (no original) and electronically shareable: capacity for remote (presence-less) and automatic application to jobs. Highly portable |
Data & Analytics |
No data exhaust or digital data trail | Anonymized verification data allows a better understanding of which skills are sought by the marketplace, reducing information asymmetry |
Currently, except for a few implementations, most academic and skill certificates are paper-based and are not digitally verifiable. In contrast, digital credentials are freely portable and easily verifiable at scale and speed by employers and job matching platforms, whilst continuing to allow print and other visual forms for human consumption. The standard enables an individual to easily transfer credentials in a trusted manner anywhere and thereby open up possibilities for applying to remote jobs. Given India’s successful Digilocker implementation, it is time for the skilling ecosystem to ensure all certificates/credentials are issued digitally still allowing printability and inclusive usage.
All schemas in this repo is meant to be for VC implementations based on internationally acceptable W3C VC specifications. Also see W3C VC implementation guide
Issuers who are interested in adopting W3C VC specs and schemas in this repo can leverage the low code open source framework, Sunbird RC, for rapidly building credential issuance and management. See Sunbird RC homepage for details.