COmanage-Dev Call 19-Sep-08
*Attending*
Heather Flanagan, Stanford (chair)
Digant Kasundra, Stanford
Scotty Logan, Stanford
Bruce Vincent, Stanford
Lois Brooks, Stanford
Jennifer Vine, Stanford
Dave Donnelly, Stanford
Tom Barton, U. Chicago
Michael Gettes, MIT
RL "Bob" Morgan, U. Washington
James Cramton, Brown
Jim Leous, Penn State
Greg Wood, Internet2
George Brett, Internet2
Renee Frost, Internet2
Ken Klingenstein, Internet2
Ann West, EDUCAUSE/Internet2
Mike LaHaye, Internet2
IJ Kim, Internet2
Colin Clark, Fluid
Jess Mitchell, Fluid
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Emily Eisbruch, Internet2 (scribe)
**New Action Item**
[AI] Ken will identify point persons from the COmanage team
to work with the Fluid community on user experience issues.
*Carry Over Action Items*
[AI] (All) review the task list in the wiki and contribute as you are inclined to.
[AI] (Stanford) will integrate the Shib 1.3 IdP into the VM image.
[AI] (Digant) will create COmanage video #2 by Sept. 19.
[AI] (Scotty) will redo COmanage video #1 to correct a few audio issues.
[AI] (Ken) will work on engaging Ed Seidel with COmanage at the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting.
**Discussion**
- Background for Collaboration with Fluid
Ken said that he met the Fluid people at a Mellon retreat in Feb. or March and realized they might be able to provide needed expertise to COmanage in the user testing and GUI development areas.
- Fluid Overview
Jess: Fluid focuses on providing a good, flexible and reusable user interface, designing chunks of functionality called components. Jess is the project manager of the Fluid project, while Colin represents the "brilliance."
Colin: Fluid has been working over last couple of months on a core framework for Fluid components, and they are on verge of v0.5 release that will allow others to build components.
Ken noted that there will be discussions with the Kuali project at the CSG meeting at Cornell next week. A topic will be whether the I2 middleware can be used within the Kuali context. So work with Fluid on COmanage could benefit Kuali and other projects besides COmanage.
- COmanage Overview
Digant provided a broad overview of COmanage. He mentioned that there is not yet a demo of what the Collabmin space will look like, but we know it will need certain pieces (info on the VO or other organization using COmanage, list of applications that have been activated for the organization, list of applications that are available to activate, pages for administering the applications, info on patches, system status and health, etc.).
Ken: An important theme is externalization of identity management information. The people picker function may eventually be part of COmanage, though there are privacy issues to be dealt with. There is growing interest in COmanage. If we had product and GUI we could be in business. We are introducing new concepts and imprinting things along the way.
Bob and Tom: In some cases, COmanage will be used not only by VO's, but also for handling enterprise application collaborative activities.
- Privacy Issues
In the Shibboleth space, there are two approaches to attribute release policies.
1. 1. A Web-based approach that allows users to consent upon release of attributes and set a default policy. A product called ARPviewer is using this approach.
2. 2. InfoCard approach. This is open-source that comes from Microsoft. It provides identity selection and attribute release mechanisms across a variety of applications. It's multiplatform, with Safari and Mozilla versions in addition to IE.
- GUIs
Tom noted that relying on the Grouper UI is not an ideal long-term approach for COmanage. COmanage collabmins (or PIs using COmanage) generally need to do simpler tasks than the Grouper UI is designed for.
Jess: COmanage seems to have many levels, many audiences. Fluid has been working with Sakai and uPortal. Iterative user testing is done to get feedback.
Ken stated that COmanage team would like help with the very high-level questions such as "How do people want to manage their collaborations? What do they want to see when they first come in?" Jess said that Fluid can help with that.
Jess mentioned that Fluid works with uPortal in putting the Fluid component code into the uPortal code base. Sometimes Fluid asks "what's biggest pain point w users?" and then takes on one or more of the pain points. They work thru it in a component solution, and do user testing.
- Next Steps
A point person within the COmanage team can help with the collaboration process.
[AI] Ken will identify point persons from the COmanage team
to work with the Fluid community on user experience issues.
- COmanage Status
Scotty reported that the Shib 2.0 IdP is now integrated into the VM image, so that a deployer can get going right away on a test basis. Also, Atlassian said yes to us bundling Confluence with COmanage.
Next COmanage Call: 3-Oct-08 at 2pm ET.