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Serge Ravet

About Serge Ravet

Serge Ravet has built his career at the intersection of critical digital innovation and emancipatory practices. He coined the concepts of “open recognition” and “recognition capital” to articulate a vision that restores agency and legitimacy to non-formal and community-driven recognition practices—too often marginalised or overlooked by institutional frameworks.

This vision has been advanced through key milestones such as the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration (2016), the Paris Declaration on the Equality of Recognitions (2024), the forthcoming Open Recognition Manifesto, and the Recognition Practices Occupational Framework (2025). Together, these initiatives synthesise insights from more than 40 European projects (including two currently underway) as well as regional initiatives such as “Badgeons la Normandie,” which pioneered a territorial approach to recognition.

Serge is President of Reconnaître – Open Recognition Alliance, co-chair of France’s National Committee of Digital Badge Actors, co-chair of the French chapter of the ISO (AFNOR) Working Group on Open Recognition, and co-director of the international ePIC conference, the world’s leading event on recognition practices, technologies, and policies.

He is also co-leading the development of ORCA (Open Recognition Community App), a distributed infrastructure designed to articulate informal, semi-formal, and formal recognition modalities across the micro (individual), meso (collective), and macro (societal) spaces.

Title

Open Recognition: Where [authentic] Open Education Begins

Abstract

This presentation explores why open recognition, a concept that emerged from the practice of Open Badges, should be seen as the true foundation of open education. Whereas open education has largely focused on widening access to formal learning, open recognition embraces the full spectrum of human experience — informal, semi-formal, and formal — across individual, organisational, and societal contexts. By shifting the center of gravity of human and societal development from education to recognition, we enact a kind of Copernican revolution: education becomes one expression of a broader movement of recognition. Open recognition not only validates learning wherever it occurs, it restores agency to individuals and communities, weaving together the principles, organisational approaches, and practices that make recognition a driver of equity, inclusion, and transformation.