Building the public infrastructure for learning and work
How Learning Tapestry contributed to the T3 Innovation Network at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, a multi-year, multi-partner effort modernizing how learning, training, and employment records connect. Five named statements of work. Four public tools. One national ecosystem.
The Problem: The U.S. Does Not Know What Its Workforce Can Do
There are three hundred and thirty million people in the US, and we have no reliable way of knowing what any given worker has learned, can do, or is certified for.
Transcripts cover only the college slice. Industry certifications live across thousands of websites, each with its own format and verification process. Military training records, apprenticeship completions, professional badges, and micro-credentials from online platforms are all scattered across systems that do not talk to each other and are maintained by organizations that have no shared infrastructure for exchanging what they know.
The result is a labor market that operates on incomplete information at every level. Employers cannot verify what candidates actually know. Workers cannot carry their credentials across state lines or industry boundaries. Education providers cannot see what skills the labor market needs next. And policymakers cannot measure whether the workforce development investments they fund are producing results.
The T3 Innovation Network — Talent, Technology, Transformation — was created by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation to build the public infrastructure to fix this. Not a single product or a single database, but a coordinated ecosystem of open standards, shared registries, and interoperable tools that would allow learning and employment records to flow across the boundaries that currently trap them.
This is infrastructure work: the kind that is invisible when it works and catastrophically absent when it does not.
Multi-partner open infrastructure is fundamentally different from commercial product work. There are no sole-source contracts and no single client who owns the direction or roadmap. Instead there are working groups, pilot cohorts, specification drafts, public comment periods, reference implementations, and negotiations toward consensus. Credibility is earned by years of showing up, building things that work, and contributing to the commons.
Learning Tapestry operated in this mode across multiple statements of work with T3, contributing technical architecture, building production tools, and participating in the working groups that shaped the ecosystem’s direction. The work was collaborative by design: specifications developed in the open, implementations shared across partners, and results measured by adoption rather than revenue.
This is not the kind of work every technology firm can do. It requires patience with process, comfort with ambiguity, and a willingness to build tools that other organizations will use and extend. It requires understanding that the goal is not a proprietary advantage but a public good.
Tools, Not Demos
The difference between a demo and a tool is whether anyone uses it after the meeting ends. Learning Tapestry built tools — production software that T3 partners and the broader ecosystem could adopt, extend, and rely on.
The Data Ecosystem Schema Mapper — a tool for mapping between the competing and overlapping data schemas in the learning-employment ecosystem. When different organizations use different terms for the same concept, DESM provides the crosswalk that makes interoperability possible.
A real tool for navigating and visualizing competency frameworks — the structured descriptions of what a person should know and be able to do. Not a static document but an interactive interface for exploring relationships between competencies across frameworks and industries.
A coordination layer for the registries, authorities, and standards bodies that make up the credential ecosystem. When dozens of organizations each maintain a piece of the puzzle, something has to help them find and connect to each other.
Registry architecture improvements spanning multiple statements of work. Strengthening the underlying infrastructure that credential registries depend on — the plumbing beneath the plumbing.
The Impact
Open infrastructure is the kind of work that is not applauded until five years later when it is clearly irreplaceable. Nobody press-releases a schema mapper. Nobody puts “built a coordination layer for credential registries” on a billboard. Yet these tools determine whether a learner in one state can carry a verified credential into a job in another. Whether a community college program can demonstrate alignment with industry requirements. Whether an employer can trust that the badge on a resume represents real, verified competency.
The T3 Innovation Network has become a foundational initiative in the national effort to modernize how learning and work connect. The tools that Learning Tapestry built are part of that foundation, not the visible structure, but the load-bearing infrastructure underneath.
A standard is only valuable when it’s mapped, published, and used. Same is true of infrastructure.
T3 is the kind of work that’s easy to underestimate if you’ve never built public infrastructure.
Steve Midgley, co-founder