March 26, 2014

Dear InCommon TAC:

The second iteration of the Interfed Working Group, chartered to continue to explore the issues related to Interfederation for InCommon, has reached the end of its appointed duration. While we feel that good progress was made toward several of our goals, there is still much work to be done. Our accomplishments, itemized according to our Charter, include:

  1. Reviewing the eduGAIN Policy Framework for potential issues that might arise if InCommon were to re

One important piece is the metadata registration practice statement.

John notes that there are other items in our charter

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Warren mentions quilt work that Tom led earlier* Mark says that things are still spinning up, but once we get to the point of having a quilt pilot that is trying to lead their members into federation, there will be choices in federation model and metadata. This group could play an important role at that point. Recommends leaving it in charter on an as-needed basis.

  • John notes there are a number of concurrent issues that are converging - for instance how interfederation and regionals fit together.
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Other deliverables have to do with EU COC (internationalized version) and new metadata aggregation and/or tagging.* Steven points out that EU COC is still being worked out, so nothing could have really been done. He suggests perhaps not recommending it for the next iteration, but that it needs to stay on the radar.

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Also item Review and assist in new metadata management paradigms* Tom thinks this is essentially operationalization of eduGAIN and that the use case here to drive it forward is LIGO.

  • Steven asks "if we reconstitute a group and we use LIGO as a model would we get participation. Warren thinks it will be of the order of a few months before LIGO is well positioned to do that."
  • John points out that the issues are broader, but this is a fine technical strategy for this issue. But there is another related issue like tools for large organizations to manage metadata.

Tom would prefer that opt-out not be part of recommendation. Group agrees.

Warren will circulate an email to group to get more perspective and then Steven will take results to TAC.

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