The InCommon Forum
Internet2 Spring 2008 Member Meeting
April 21, 2008
John Krienke reported that InCommon has added 21 participants since the last Internet2 Member Meeting (October 2007), an increase of 26 percent. This brings the total to 55 higher education participants, 22 sponsored partners and three government agencies/research labs.
**Technical Issue Updates**
- InCommon X.509 certificates now are valid for two years.
- The target for making available embedded ("inline") certificates is June 25
- Key management implies downloading often; the recommendation is at least daily
- Shibboleth 2.0 has been released and we need to start discussing migration
**Collaboration Groups**
There are several collaboration/working groups associated with InCommon. Here is an update from each.
...
New VIVA case study- VIVA is a consortium of Virginia libraries that has started making federated resources available. The case is on the InCommon website.
**InCommon Steering Committee**
The InCommon Steering Committee is the organization's governing body, meeting bi-weekly and including representatives from a diverse group of institutions. One of the goals is to have a mix of representation: public/private, large/small state universities, national/regional universities. The committee includes a maximum of 13 members (there are currently 10) who rotate in three-year terms. New members include Kevin Morooney from Penn State and Chris Shillum from Elsevier. Tracy Mitrano from Cornell was asked to serve an additional three-year term because of her legal expertise. In addition, Norma Holland is the ex-officio member from EDUCAUSE.
Kevin Morooney commented that InCommon appears to be entering a time of growth and change. During this time, success will be a function of InCommon participants communicating strongly with the steering committee as they discuss membership requirements, the federation's economic model and the incentives and disincentives for joining.
**Technical Advisory Committee (TAC)**
The InCommon Technical Advisory Committee provides recommendations relating to the operation and management of InCommon with respect to technical issues. R.L. "Bob" Morgan said that the TAC has spent a great deal of time on InCommon's identity assurance framework, including the Silver level of assurance, which is now available on the wiki for comment here.
The TAC is also working on a new way to present attributes at the time of authentication, which should help in leveraging a number of applications. This is somewhat complicated and ties in with how the IdP manages its information. manage info. What will be useful for applications - varies app to app.
**Federations**
The group discussed various issues related to federations built on top of InCommon and interfederating with state-based federations.
...
The Great Plains Network is pushing forward to establish an IdP and to join InCommon as a way to help its members see the value of federating.
**SAML 2**
Bob Morgan reported that the interoperability of the SAML 2 protocol seems to be much better than SAML 1, leading to hope for a much more interoperable future. Shibboleth 2.0 supports both SAML protocols and the SAML metadata allows you to specify which protocol you are using.
There are some SP deployments that use only SAML 2 and InCommon will soon support that protocol, which should bring such SPs into the federation.
In the meantime, Scott Cantor asked for feedback from site administrators on the types of functionality and interfaces they would like as the federation begins supporting SAML 2. The current discussion is to provide a straight editing interface that would allow administrators to edit their own metadata.
**K-12 Federations**
There was a discussion about the role of InCommon in discussions about K-12 participation in the federation. The operation of IdPs for K-12 entities, and whether aggregation of several districts into one regional or state-wide IdP would make sense. This will be one of the topics to be discussed at the Federation Soup meeting, discussed below.
**Federation Soup Meeting**
Federation Soup will take place in Seattle, June 2-4, 2008. The concept is to begin charting a course as the demands for federations increase. K-12 involvement is one topic, along with state governments, the U.S. government, and interfederating with other national federations.
**Potential Sponsored Partners**
Renee Shuey reported working with a provider of alcohol education services (alcoholEDU) that is not a member of InCommon but has contracts with a number of InCommon participants. John Krienke pointed out that the InCommon Collaboration wiki has a page where InCommon IdPs can list vendors that may be candidates for federating. He encouraged attendees to add their information to the wiki here.