Thanks for sharing this Stephen. I like very much the idea of Trusted Earner Endorsement and we are going to implement something similar in the Open Badge Passport for this autumn (before the ePIC conference 26–28 October in Bologna). There should be variations available and all start with a claim made by a ‘candidate”:

• 2 or more reviewers listed in a pool of reviewers receive a link to a form (no need to have a badge) which contains the claim. They can approve, ask for more information or reject the claim (the last option is only if the claim is irrelevant, otherwise it should be “approved” or “no yet approved.” If the reviewers do not respond in time, another reviewer is invited.
• The ‘candidate’ claims a badge available through a link on the issuing platform, then seeks endorsements from peers. After a number of endorsements from people holding that badge, the ‘candidate’ receives that badge automatically
• Badge issuing condition: in order to issue a certain badge, the issuer needs to own that badge.

Your use case should be supported by the Open Badge Passport/Factory. It should be used as another example of why we need to introduce a new metadata in the Open Badge specification 2.0 in relation to:

• conditional issuing of badges (machine executable)
• conditional earning of badges (ibid. in addition to existing criteria)

As for ‘corporate readiness’ I would not be so pessimistic: if we give people the power to write their own claims regarding a business or a service, and those (standardised) claims are easily searchable with Google, I imagine that they should pay attention to them. This might also challenge the business model of services like Trip Advisor… and more…