InCommon Steering Committee Minutes - April 2, 2018
Attending: Melissa Woo, Ted Hanss, Pankaj Shah, Sean Reynolds, Marty Ringle, Klara Jelinkova, Mark Scheible, Michael Gettes, Celeste Schwartz, Laura Paglione, Mike Erickson, Brett Bieber, Dee Childs
With: Kevin Morooney, Steve Zoppi
Action Items
(AI) Kevin and Klara will discuss the goals for the TIER Investors meeting.
(AI) Kevin will investigate which TIER investor CIOs will be at the Global Summit and contact those who are attending, asking them to attend the breakfast.
(AI) Kevin will talk to several people to gather information on the email regarding Globus and concerns about ePPN (eduPerson Principal Name).
Minutes from March 5 were approved via the wiki
Face2Face at Global Summit
Steering is scheduled 9:30 am - 10:30 am on Monday, May 7
The Executive Track starts at 10:30 am on Monday, May 7
(AI) Kevin and Klara will discuss the goals for the TIER Investors meeting. The likely two agenda items include providing a program update to the investor community, and stimulating a discussion of the future of software development in the Internet2 community. The TIER investment ends at the end of this year. Also invited to the meeting are the Trust and Identity PAG, InCommon Steering, and TIER Campus Success Program CIOs. The Campus Success Program CIOs have already had a conversation on the software development topic.
(AI) Kevin will investigate which TIER investor CIOs will be at the Global Summit and contact those who are attending, asking them to attend the breakfast.
TIER Update
Overall, the InCommon Federation is tightly tied to the TIER program. The new features and capabilities of the Federation are closely tied to the TIER software development.
The three-year TIER investor funding is ramping down at the end of 2018. At the same time the TIER investor funding went into effect, Internet2 also increased its funding for software development, which has created a higher baseline once the investor funding ends.
Steve Zoppi reported that the TIER developers have written a document that shows the work that will be completed by the end of 2018.
Shibboleth User Interface Development
Internet2 engaged with Unicon to build a user interface for the TIER version of the Shibboleth Identity Provider. The UI will is a standalone item, built on the current release (v. 3.3) of the Shibboleth IdP. It is designed to be extensible and modular and the community will be able to contribute to the software. This will significantly simplify the installation and configuration of the IdP, which is controlled by more than 50 configuration files. Once the framework is developed, changing and adding plug-ins will be straightforward.
The UI walks an admin through a series of informed questions and generates an outcome based on the answers provided. The admin will see both the questions and the final result prior to deploying the results. This is expected to help educate the admin, help with attribute release and configuration, and greatly simplify this process. There is a sample of the UI here.
The SP will probably not have a UI until late 2019 or early 2020, unless someone decides to develop something and contribute a plug in before that.
Shibboleth Consortium
Several months ago, InCommon Steering and the Shibboleth Consortium board independently discussed the Consortium board’s changes in the Shibboleth support model. Those changes meant that Consortium members would receive a higher level of support, while non-members would have the minimal support (mainly listservs) that you would expect from an open source project. This led InCommon Steering to conversations about support for all InCommon Participants and whether the Consortium might entertain such a proposal. These talks hit a pause as InCommon implemented Baseline Expectations.
The changes in the support structure resulted in an increase in membership in the Shibboleth Consortium, providing an increase in funds. Neither the Consortium nor InCommon have seen any appreciable changes in Shibboleth-related questions.
Part of the reason for the UI development is to make things easier to install, configure, and maintain, and thus relieve the large portion of support questions that are periodically repeated as new organizations deploy Shibboleth. This may shift the support concerns to a different level, but that remains to be seen. The Shibboleth Consortium still has a need to generate new engineering talent (right now there are three engineers that work on the software) and build the talent pool.
The Trust and Identity PAG will be discussing software development, including which software components require additional support and how the support will be funded. That may include a bigger commitment to Shibboleth. The big questions are 1) what are the key software development needs, 2) what level of fees are needed to accomplishment development, and 3) how will those fees be allocated among in-house developers and consultants.
Baseline Expectations
Brett Bieber, chair of CTAB, reported that the first two health check emails have had a major effect on metadata updates. In terms of the PA agreement, Kevin reported that the number of questions to the service desk is very low and the Internet2 legal team has only received two requests so far inquiring about changes. It looks like the communications campaign, including the webinars, have worked.
CTAB is now looking at providing advice in a number of areas, including privacy policy and UI elements (mainly around logos). They hope to have this advice ready by the end of April. Marty reported a need among the CLAC schools for privacy policy advice - none of them report having a policy that would meet GDPR. David Bantz and Chris Whalen are working on that area for CTAB and Marty will contact them directly. Brett said CTAB will provide advice in three areas: 1) what if you do not have a privacy policy, 2) providing some templates and 3) improving an existing privacy policy.
The CTAB recommends Mary Catherine Martinez (of Innsoft) as the new vice chair. She would move to chair when Brett’s term ends December 31, 2018. It was moved, seconded, and unanimously approved that she become the CTAB vice chair.
Globus email
Von Welch distributed an email from Steve Tuecke at Globus concerning their intent to discontinue use of the Research & Scholarship category. (AI) Kevin will be talking to several people to gather information on what this means. Laura suggested looking at ePPN and the challenges that Steve’s mail outlines. Putting aside specifics related to Globus, it would be worth looking at the issues raised about ePPN. This will be on the agenda for the next Steering meeting.