Creating credentials for others

In addition to allowing individuals to create their own credentials, SkillsGraph allows entities or people to create credentials that they award to individuals (like a school diploma or a course completion certificate).

Governance frameworks

If you are an organization or person that wishes to award a credential to a group of individuals, the first step is to set up your own processes for deciding the requirements for awarding the credential -- called a 'governance framework'. (SkillsGraph provides infrastructure for awarding and authenticating credentials, but we don't make the decision when to award or authenticate credentials. We believe that it's crucial to separate trust infrastructure from individual trust decisions.)

It is possible for a governance framework to be very simple or very complicated. To take a simple example, the governing council of a club may have complete authority to decide whether to admit new members (and issue a membership credential). Another common example is the university degree process, for which the requirements tend to be detailed and a lot more complex. Professional certifications also tend to have detailed formal requirements, but with less complexity than a university degree. The Trust over IP Foundation provides a detailed model on how to approach governance of digital credentials.

SkillsGraph doesn't require you to have a governance framework in order to use our credential creation tools, but we recommend that you think hard about these issues before you start issuing credentials. We plan to provide additional support on these issues in the future, including model governance frameworks.

Creating a credential

In our proof of concept, it is simple to create a new credential.

First, you must have an account on SkillsGraph. This may be the same account that you use to store your personal skills and credentials, or a separate account.

From the home page of the account that you wish to use to create the credential, click on 'Create New Credential for Others' and then supply the following information:

• credential name

• credential type - currently this may be Education, Work or General (other options will be introduced later)

• description - this should communicate to recipients the basics of what the credential means (details can be provided by you elsewhere, and could be linked in the description)

• logo -- optionally, you can add an image to the credential by uploading a JPEG or PNG file

• list of participants / recipients -- this must be in the format 'name <email>', without the quotation marks and with a new line for each recipient.

Then just click 'Create'. For each recipient, SkillsGraph will then create a DID and credential, record them to the blockchain and notify the recipient by email.

Viewing and managing credentials

You can view the credentials that you have created (including a list of recipients -- which we call 'Participants') by clicking on 'List Credentials for Others' on your home page. A Cardano testnet transaction ID is provided for each participant.

You can add additional Participants by clicking 'Add Participants'.

You can revoke a credential for a Participant by clicking 'Revoke' after their email address.