Roads were paths before they became infrastructure, and water was a resource before it became a utility and public right. There is a specific political and social act in deciding that something belongs to everyone; that it must outlive any single vendor, any single administration, any single moment of political will. That act is not primarily technical, it's moral. And it usually happens quietly, in documents most people don't read, before it becomes obvious in retrospect.
I've been thinking about that act a lot the past few weeks. Not because the W3C CCG threads have been particularly revealing (though they have), but because I’ve had a front row seat to watching it happen at scale, in real time, and in two places at once.
What California is Saying
Procurement documents are not usually where you find clarity about the future.
They tend to be cautious, specific, and written to avoid commitment. The California Career Passport RFP is something notably different.
Early in the document, the state does something I haven't seen in language like this before. It names the problem not as a credential management or employer adoption challenge, not as a technology gap, but as an infrastructure failure. The people who have skills, capability, and experience—and whose lives have not passed through the particular institutional channels that employers and systems recognize—aren't facing a motivation problem or a skills gap in the conventional sense. They're facing a visibility and portability problem. Their learning is real. Their capability is real. The infrastructure for recognizing it simply isn't.
From what I can tell, California is treating that gap as something the public is obligated to fix.
That framing matters enormously, because everything that follows from it is structurally different than what would follow from, "we need a better credential platform." If this is infrastructure, it has to outlive vendors. It has to work regardless of which organizations are still operating in five years, including ours. It has to remain accessible and open even as markets shift, and they will. The RFP reflects exactly that logic by leaning into open standards like W3C Verifiable Credentials and Open Badges v3.0, not as technical preferences but as expressions of a governing principle: this data belongs to learners, not to the companies that help them manage it.
There's a line near the end of the RFP that I keep returning to: it asks respondents to describe not how they would build the best product or center their own platform, but how their approach integrates with and strengthens the ecosystem. That's an unusual question to put in a procurement doc. It's asking bidders to demonstrate they understand the system and category logic they're operating in, not just the solution they're selling.
When I read language like that, something hopeful settles.
What the World is Saying
On May 1st (the day following the Career Passport Preproposal Conference), the Transforming Global Education Summit (TGES) convenes at the ECOSOC Chamber at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Learning Economy Foundation is honored to co-host alongside PVBLIC Foundation and the governments of Antigua and Barbuda and the Kingdom of Tonga.
The summit is organized around a premise that will be familiar to anyone who read California's RFP carefully:
Education must be treated as digital public infrastructure.
Not as a service. Not as a product sector. As infrastructure much like roads and clean water and electrical grids represent. The kind a society is collectively responsible for, that must remain accessible regardless of income, that cannot be allowed to fail because the consequences are felt by everyone, especially those who had the least margin to absorb them.
What we found critical and compelling about the choice to center Small Island Developing States in this convening is that it isn't symbolic. Antigua and Barbuda, Tonga—these are nations that have had to think about infrastructure without the luxury of legacy systems to fall back on. Nations where the cost of getting it wrong is immediate and visible in ways that larger economies can ignore or defer for decades. Where leapfrogging is less a metaphor, and more a survival strategy.
They have been doing the hard thinking about what it actually means to build learning systems that are sovereign, portable, and durable. And they are bringing that thinking to the UN not as aspirational framing, but as real and immediate governance design.
The summit isn't asking whether education should be treated as infrastructure. It's asking what that requires in practice.
The Convergence
Here is what I find remarkable: these two events were not coordinated. California's procurement team and the organizers of a UN summit did not sit down together and decide to use the same framing in the same week. Ian Davidson, who now runs Signol Labs, published a post last week that read like it could have come from our own internal conversations, right down to the language of ecosystem over platform, of public infrastructure over private product.
This is what convergence looks like. Not a coordinated campaign. People working on adjacent problems, from different positions, in different vocabularies, arriving at the same critical coordinates independently. It can't be manufactured, but when it happens you feel it. You feel it the way consensus becomes audible before it becomes obvious.
The act of naming something as infrastructure, as a public good and shared obligation, is how systems change. Not when the technology is ready. Not when the market matures. When enough people, in enough rooms, say the same thing out loud.
That threshold feels closer than it has for many years. Since the Education Blockchain Initiative, and subsequent summit in Washington D.C., that helped to seed a new paradigm and industry nearly a decade ago.
What This Actually Means for Learners
There is a version of the future where learners everywhere, regardless of what path their lives have taken, carry a clear, portable, trustworthy record of what they know and what they can do. Where that record crosses systems and borders without being owned or filtered by any single institution. Where sovereignty over one's own story of growth is not a premium feature but a baseline expectation enabled by a commitment to shared infrastructure.
That future has felt, for a long time, like something worth arguing for. Something to be defended at conferences, piloted with early adopters, explained to skeptics who see the vision but not the path.
What this moment feels like is different. Not because the work is done (it definitely isn't), but because the framing is hardening in the right direction. California is saying "infrastructure failure" in a legal document. Youth and heads of state are gathering at the UN to treat it as a governance priority. The language of sovereignty, portability, and agency is migrating from advocacy into policy.
There's a phrase I keep returning to: pulling the future into the present. The work isn't about inventing something new. It's about recognizing that the world many of us have been building toward is already trying desperately to arrive. And that the collective job right now is to reduce the friction between where we are now and where we know we need to be.
I'm heading into the Career Passport pre-conference and TGES carrying one thing I know I can name honestly: gratitude. For the people who have been doing this work for years without fanfare. For the states and governments willing to say "infrastructure failure" out loud in legal documents. For the small island nations willing to bring their hard-won thinking about sovereignty and resilience to the highest table. And for the learners who have been navigating broken systems long before anyone thought to call it an infrastructure problem.
None of us own this future. It doesn't belong to any organization, any platform, any country, or any convening, but we're all responsible for it. And much like roads or water or electric grids, it belongs, most of all, to the future generations who will inherit the choices we make today.
