InCommon Steering Committee Minutes - November 5, 2018
Minutes
Attending: Melissa Woo, Sean Reynolds, Dave Vernon, Michael Gettes, Laura Paglione, Mark Scheible, Celeste Schwartz, Dee Childs, Ted Hanss, Brett Bieber, Klara Jelinkova, Ann West
With: Kevin Morooney
Action Items
(AI) Ann will do some legwork to recruit one or more corporate service provider nominees for Steering.
(AI) Sean will develop the nominating letter over the next two days, with a goal of distributing it to the participants by the end of this week or early next week.
2019 InCommon Steering Nominations
Kevin recapped the nominations process. There are four seats open. Michael and Klara are completing their second consecutive three-year terms and are not eligible for nomination. Ted and Celeste are completing their first three-year terms and are eligible for another three-year term. Steering can have 7-13 members and, in a previous meeting, the committee expressed the desire to remain at 13. Steering nominates two people for each open seat and communicates that to Kevin, as the representative of Internet2.
The nominees are listed on this wiki page: 2019 Steering Nominations
Kevin has had brief explanatory conversations with some of the nominees and intends to talk with the others this week.
There was discussion last month about making an effort to nominate a corporate service provider representative. (AI) Ann will do some legwork to recruit one or more nominees.
(AI) Sean will develop the nominating letter over the next two days, with a goal of distributing it to the participants by the end of this week or early next week.
It was also noted that Steering officers currently serve on the Trust and Identity PAG. This could continue, but is not required.
Sponsored Partners and Expectations
There was discussion about a thread on the participants email list started by Jack Suess concerning an increased expectation of corporate sponsored partners. The concern is that some sponsored partners seem to join InCommon and promote that fact, but don’t actually deploy metadata or use the multilateral nature of the federation. One proposal is to develop another list for the website that would call out whether an organization has metadata and supports R&S and SIRTFI. Also, the InCommon deployment profile is just about complete, and participants could self-assert their support of the profile, and we could publish that as well.
Ann mentioned that the effort to encourage compliance with Baseline Expectations has been extensive and expensive. InCommon needs to find other ways to incent the right behavior.
There is also the need to reinforce the benefits of multilateral federation. Michael mentioned that resolution for the Heartbleed situation a few years ago (changing certificates) was accomplished within one day with InCommon, but it took two weeks to solve the problem with the bilateral agreements.
InCommon Fee Increase Discussion
The joint InCommon Steering and Trust and Identity PAG meeting at TechEx focused on Kevin’s draft community presentation for the proposed InCommon fee increase. He will be incorporating that feedback over the next week or so.
There is an Internet2 board meeting the last week of November, which will include a discussion of Internet2 finances overall. The fee increase proposal will be a very small part of that. Barring any unforeseen issues, the plan is to schedule a webinar in December to begin socializing the topic with the community. The ultimate goal is a Steering resolution in March.
Steering members can help foreshadow this conversation with any appropriate constituencies. As well, Kevin intends to meet with as many constituent groups as possible to make the case for the increase.
Baseline Expectations
Brett reported on the progress as we approach the December 14 deadline for meeting Baseline Expectations. Metadata health checks are being sent bi-weekly now and we’re holding open office hours weekly to answer questions. Currently 82% of identity providers meet Baseline (that number was 16% in February). Almost 75% of organizations meeting Baseline. There was discussion of doing a survey early next year to gauge whether participants see more value in InCommon post-Baseline (similar to a survey done after the eduGAIN integration in 2015).