InCommon Steering Committee Meeting - January 6, 2020

Minutes

Attending: Ted Hanss, Mike Erickson, Christine Miki, Pankaj Shah, Chris Sedore, Laura Paglione, Sean Reynolds, Ann West, Marc Wallman, Michael Berman, Dee Childs, Brad Christ, Dave Robinson

With: Von Welch, David Bantz, Kevin Morooney, Steve Zoppi

Informational Items

  • InCommon Technical Advisory Committee officers have been selected
    • TAC Chair – Janemarie Duh (no change)
    • TAC Vice Chair – Keith Wessel (no change)
  • InCommon Community Trust and Assurance Board officers have been selected
    • CTAB Chair – David Bantz (was vice chair in 2019)
    • CTAB Vice Chair – Mary-Catherine Martinez (was chair in 2019)

Steering Officers

Slate of officers, as nominated in December, is:

  • Ted Hanss, Chair
  • Mike Erickson, Vice-Chair
  • Laura Paglione, Secretary

All were elected unanimously.

Face-to-Face Summary

Ted distributed his notes from the Face-to-Face held at TechEx, along with the beginnings of a topic list for Steering meetings during 2020.

Some issues to consider

  • Overall, what does success look like at the end of 2020, 2021, 2022?
  • Business case - selling the story of identity and access management
    • CIOs convincing Provosts and CFOS that IAM is an area in need of investment
    • Engaging with research and research services, and related support
    • Are academic medical centers a community to engage with?
    • Other communities?
  • eduroam
    • Interesting work in some states to make eduroam more ubiquitous
  • Future InCommon fee increases
    • Conversation about the need for future increases and how the community will react
    • Is the funding mix of InCommon appropriate and sustainable?
    • Is there an exit process when participants leave the federation? (Yes - and typically it is because they aren’t using the federation)
  • The rise of proxies and relationship to business model
  • InCommon Trusted Access Platform value and socialization
  • Working group updates
  • Need to recruit and engage new members of Steering. Are our demographics representative? Are there communities we need to engage with?

Kevin will be doing two presentations at Global Summit and will be looking for feedback from Steering and the PAG. 

  1. InCommon Roadmap and “state of the union”
  2. Value proposition for InCommon
  3. Also, he will be presenting at some point during the Executive Track

Some general thoughts from Steering members:

  1. Laura mentioned a post from Scholarly Kitchen, a blog hosted by the Society for Scholarly Publishing, “Who is Competing to Own Researcher Identity?” (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/01/06/competing-researcher-identity/)
  2. In general, non-R1 institutions are likely understaffed in terms of helping researchers get access to resources. Making things accessible and easy to understand is key.
  3. CIOs (and institutions in general) likely don’t know how their IdP is used; that is, who is using what resources. 
  4. In terms of attribute release, people don’t understand the Research & Scholarship Category and its value.
  5. SeamlessAccess.org activities may indicate a need for a Steering member or advisor from the library community
  6. The discussion of attrition may not be about losing participants, but a fear of some structural happening that disrupts the federation model. In addition, there are missed opportunities on campuses in terms of interaction with, and ease of access by researchers.

Here is a general outline for the next few meetings

  • February - engaging and supporting research communities
  • March 
    • Kevin’s Global Summit presentation(s) - making the InCommon business case
    • Expanding the community
  • April
    • Review the overall InCommon portfolio
    • eduroam strategy
  • May
    • Inflationary and programmatic fee increases
  • June
    • InCommon Trusted Access Platform update
  • July
    • Recruiting of new Steering Committee members and advisors

Steering members are asked to review Ted’s document in more detail and ask questions and start discussions.

Next Meeting

Monday, February 3, 2020 - 4 pm ET / 3 pm CT / 2 pm MT / 1 pm PT


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