eduGAIN Policy and Community Working Group Meeting Notes
August 20, 2014
Present
Warren Anderson, LIGO/UW-Milwaukee
Donald Beck - Davidson County Community College
Susan Blair - University of Florida
Steven Carmony - Brown University
Chris Holmes - Baylor University
John Krienke - InCommon
Tracy Migrano - InCommon
Teresa Semmens - North Dakota State (chair)
Von Welch - Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research
Ann West - InCommon
Bill Yock - University of Washington
Regrets
Craig Jackson
Notes
Welcome and Introductions
Theresa, our chair, asked each member to introduce themselves and provide information on what they would like to take away from and bring to the WG.
Why International Interfederation Matters?
Chris provided an introduction to the WG:
InCommon and identity federation enables institutions to vouch for an affiliated individual for the purposes of accessing mission-related resources hosted outside the organization and making it easier for collaboration and the exchange data. Not only do we have the need to connect with organizations in the US, but we also have drivers for international relationships.Currently each organization with users or provider of services must join the federations of their partners. Having InCommon join the eduGAIN service enables sharing of information about services in a scaleable way.
The current InCommon policy and legal framework (our "rules") govern this exchange within the US. This WG is charged with reviewing those rules, deciding what they should be given this new international context, making a recommendation to the InCommon Steering Committee on the wording and developing a plan for communicating about the changes.
Do we need to be concerned with the import/export rules? What’s the scope of interfederation? The policies we'll be reviewing are the set of rules for how the technology works and the roles and responsibilities of InCommon Operations and participants. eduGAIN has over 30 national Research and Education Federation members. Each is operating under national law and policy declarations, just like InCommon. eduGAIN has set a low bar for membership and required only a signed declaration to publish what these are. There is no statement about what kind of research is allowed, for instance.
Will the group be considering the R&S category tag? Without this, research connections may not scale. Yes, R&S is scope, but it's not our primary concern, unless the group decides otherwise.
Warren then presented a few slides on LIGO (See slides) The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory is a large-scale virtual organization that consists of hundreds of scientists on almost every continent. They collaborate with other international organizations like VIrgo, which has 230 scientists in 4 different countries. LIGO issues its own accounts to all these individuals, but would like to spend more time on science and less time managing credentials and verifying the identity of people all over the world. However, to set up a federated relationship takes time. Recently they began to interact directly with the federation in Japan. It took six months and multiple trips to set up the trust mechanisms to make this work. Clearly, this doesn't scale across all the R&E federations. However, now the Japanese researchers can now use their home institution logins to access LIGO resources.
Recently, LIGO signed an MOU with multiple groups representing the broader astronomy community across 24 countries. They are working with InCommon to pilot the sharing of 3 services with the other national federations, 18 of which either are members of or joining eduGAIN.
Charter
Ann provided an overview of the Charter. The group will pick up there next week on August 27th at 4:00 pm ET.