I happened upon this website while searching about passports (https://passport.cancred.ca/faq/#What%20is%20CanCred%20Passport?) and how they may or may not relate to digital badges. Discendum offers several solutions, a few of which are badge related: Open Badge Factory and Open Badge Passport. They seem to be recently active still based on their training and events.

Open Badge Factory (https://www.discendum.com/obf/) solution helps one become a "trusted Open Badge issuer." You can issue, manage and integrate badges with "your platform." There are plugins for Moodle, Optima, Totara, Blackboard, Brightspace, Canvas, LearnDash, Mahara, and WordPress. They also point out you can track the badges you issue and evaluate their value. It would be interesting to see if the idea of badge valuation has been raised in literature, used in other badging solutions, and reflect on how this could be poorly implemented against a better solution. This idea of badge valuation makes me think of technology maturing (because I am not certain it was part of the earlier badging system design) such as features being added or removed, and other things change (e.g. system rules) where one must be careful that these changes do not adversely affect the implementation or the "how you do it"

Whereas Open Badge Passport (https://www.discendum.com/obp/) is intended for badge earners. Although users can register using their LinkedIn or Facebook account, they can also create a new user account, and this is a critical piece to the implementation, that is to not have a prerequisite to a system to prevent preclusion.

I'm still left to figure out if passports are something different, I must revisit the conversation I had with my co-worker the other day. Perhaps he was referring to a passport in the sense used here.