Minutes

Attending: Matt Brookover, Judith Bush, Janemarie Duh, Heather Flanagan, Eric Goodman, Mary McKee, Steven Premeau, Mark Rank

With (Also Starring): David Bantz, IJ Kim, Johnny Lasker, Dave Shafer, David Walker, Ann West, Albert Wu, Steve Zoppi

Regrets:  Keith Wessel

Agenda Bash

If anyone has objections to TAC’s deployment recommendations to Steering (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QzDPlPsMuEKCDnpY3cPdMcXnKRPs6RN4gkshNygcScc/edit), respond today, or it will be passed on to Steering as is.

Status Updates

• T&I and Ops Updates
  
  • There’ll be some changes to the Federation Manager’s scoring for Baseline to ease some concerns that have been expressed by participants.
  • eduroam is being rearchitected, possibly extended to K-12.
• (email) International Update, SeamlessAccess, and Browser Changes Updates
  • Heather is conducting a webinar about the current browser issues: https://www.stm-assoc.org/events/web-browsers-privacy-and-your-publishing-platform-webinar/
• (email) Working and liaison group updates - including 2021 plan items

  • Federation 2.0

  • CTAB: Baseline compliance is ~50%
  • Janemarie sent email to the TAC requesting review of a draft note to the REFEDS SP group about InCommon’s federation testing working group.

Items of relevance to the TAC from pre-TNC, TNC, and (maybe) Identiverse

• Albert posted information about an IdP as a Service session in the Slack tac-discuss channel, which seems to be gone now. The Australian federation is working on a tool that might be useful to other federations in 2-3 years.
• Tac-discuss had a 14-day expiration for posts. It’s being changed to 90 days.

How to navigate large-scale change in federation 

• Heather observed that federation seems to be at a tipping point.
  • The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• Mary: Regarding Baseline it’s easier to move good participants to great than horrible participants to fair.
• Albert: Are we focused on the right things (tactical vs. strategic)? Are we too tied to our legacy, so can’t respond to the future?
• Eric G: More than half of UC campuses want a specific request to release attributes. (Perhaps excluding R&S - which may invalidate my point)
• Judith: Federation 2.0 recognizes that attribute release is important, but access control is the real issue. It’s not just fixing the authentication login flow; only the home institutions can provide the information needed to support this.
  
• Albert: (At least at UC) IdP operations support both research and enterprise, and generally enterprise is the priority. Enterprise generally involves a bilateral contract; research does not.
• Eric G: We spend most of our time on what people don’t have/do (e.g., identifiers). Not clear what the alternative is, though.
  • David W: The issue is how to include participants, perhaps in alternative ways or with reduced capability, that don’t necessarily do everything the way we think they should. 
• Albert: Baseline moves horrible to fair. It doesn't address moving good to great.
• Mary: We need better outreach to convince people that we’re worth working with. We need to be having conversations with people who are just starting to explain how we can help.
• Mark: People just want to get to their goal. The “right” thing is lower priority. How do we reduce the friction for accomplishing those goals?
• What we should be / who we should serve is core to what we prioritize. Do we focus only on research? Expand to enterprise?
• Judith: What about branding? What does it mean to brand “InCommon” when other federations are involved?
  • David W: It’s more than just branding. We need stronger international / interfederation coordination to get things deployed.

EMail Updates

Federation 2.0

Federation 2.0 anxiously looks at the end of July self imposed deadline.