The partnership marks a significant step forward in thought leadership and collaboration, with both organizations aligning their missions to benefit the global community.
May 6, 2025 – The Velocity Network Foundation (VNF) and the Groningen Declaration Network (GDN) have officially signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), marking the beginning of a strategic partnership. With a shared mission of supporting learner global mobility and ensuring trust in digital credentials for education and work, both organizations are committed to creating trusted digital ecosystems and they bring expertise as thought leaders in the field.
“We’re excited to forge this important partnership with the GDN and expand the collaboration between our two organizations. The GDN and VNF share a vision of frictionless global mobility of individuals through their career by providing individuals with ownership and control over digital, verifiable, trusted credentials. Through this partnership, we will join forces of the organizations and our communities to accelerate the awareness, adoption and utility of verifiable credentials in education and work,” says Dror Gurevich, CEO, Board Director of The Velocity Network Foundation.
This strategic collaboration will focus on raising awareness about the foundations of credential trust, promoting best practices in building trusted ecosystems, and ensuring adherence to standards for verifying digital credentials. Most importantly, this formal partnership seeks to enhance academic and professional mobility on a global scale through facilitating the sharing of knowledge and dialogue, contributing to research projects, and hosting a series of webinars.
“Continuing to expand the GDN’s efforts to create a Network of Networks ecosystem of convenings, collaborations, and future initiatives sits at the core of this MOU,” says Joanne Duklas, Executive Director of the GDN. “As a first illustration that builds on our knowledge building priorities, we have co-created a series on trust to catalyze further thinking and conversations in this space. I’m excited to continue this work with VNF to help our communities.”
“The GDN enables digital learner mobility through advancing opportunities to build capacity and interoperability,” says Melanie Gottlieb, President of the GDN. “Achieving seamless credential exchange involves working across our organizational and national boundaries to enable trusted exchange, regardless of the technology or standards used. VNF’s work in the creation of a trust framework represents another example of efforts in the digital credential space to support learner mobility through credential portability. We are excited to expand the conversations through this MOU.”
Velocity’s Network Foundation’s expertise, along with its Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) will benefit the GDN’s community, which includes higher education institutions, government, industry partners, not-for-profit organizations and associations, and experts and researchers in the fields of recognition, learner mobility, and technology. Together, the organizations are committed to supporting best practices, establishing globally accepted standards and ensuring greater trust in credentials worldwide.
About
About the GDN Network: The GDN Network is an international, non-profit federated trust located in the Netherlands. It represents a voluntary network of like-minded organizations and individuals that seek to make digital student data portability happen. Its network of thought leaders from around the globe are collaborators who seek to support, advise, and offer innovative changes in the ways we share artifacts of academic learning. The GDN Network seeks common ground while creating a Network of Networks model for collaboration as it seeks to best support the academic and professional mobility needs of citizens worldwide by bringing together stakeholders in the digital student data ecosystem. It seeks to develop and support best practices and globally accepted standards for safe and citizen-oriented convenings and information exchanges. Learn more about the GDN Network at groningendeclaration.org.
About Velocity Network Foundation: Velocity Network Foundation® is a non-profit membership organization hosting the leading workforce-tech and ed-tech vendors and solution providers, as well as NGOs, government, and industry associations representing major labor market stakeholders. Together, Velocity Network Foundation’s Members work to combat the challenges and inefficiencies of hiring people based on what they say themselves about their skills, identity, education, and work Credentials. Velocity Network Foundation provides a game-changing, decentralized trust framework called Velocity Network™, which empowers individuals to have agency over their verifiable education and career information, replacing the outdated, fragmented way talent represents their career reputation across the labor market. The Network is a free, publicly-available utility built on open-source tech and protocols. It is governed by Velocity Network Foundation®, enabling inclusive, decentralized governance. Learn more at https://www.velocitynetwork.foundation/.
Media Contacts
Maya Hardy, Outreach Lead, [email protected]
Media and Analyst Relations, Velocity Network Foundation, [email protected]
