This is an attempt to share a bit of history of the Grouper Project.
Many institutions and individuals have contributed and unfortunately it's impossible to mention all of them here.
Thanks to everyone who has helped build Grouper and the Grouper community. There is a partial list of acknowledgements on the Grouper webpage.
Grouper History from Ken Klingenstein (as of 2019)
A group management tool was part of the original thinking of RL Bob Morgan, University of Washington, and others for the Internet2 Middleware Initiative. I recall group management being mentioned in the Fall 1999 Internet2 meeting in Seattle.
The early interest in groups was driven by two thoughts – when you have a bunch of good identities, the first thing you want to do is put them into groups, and groups were thought to be (and still are) the simple way to do role-based access control. That vision was temporarily parked as we began the federated identity development, which led to the InCommon Federation.
Tom Barton, the primary architect and genius behind Grouper, entered the Internet2 sphere as an early adopter at University of Memphis, and began work on Grouper. . This would date the start of Grouper to the first NMI grant, circa fall 2000. For more on NMI, see http://www.nmi-edit.org/
Additional Notes
Tom Barton's leadership of Grouper continued as he moved to University of Chicago. Leadership of Grouper passed to Chris Hyzer, University of Pennsylvania in 2015.
Foundational Documents
For foundational Grouper documents see this wiki
A few Grouper Team photos
2013 at Identity Week in Burlingame, CA
2014 in Indianapolis
2015 in Cleveland
2017 Grouper BOF in