InCommon Steering Committee Meeting - April 6, 2020


Attending: Sean Reynolds, Ted Hanss, Dave Robinson, Marc Wallman, Christine Miki, Ann West, Brad Christ, Michael Berman, Dee Child, Chris Sedore, Pankaj Shah, Laura Paglione

With: David Bantz, Dean Woodbeck, Von Welch, Janemarie Duh, Tom Jordan, Steve Zoppi, Jessica Fink.

What changes are taking place at InCommon and at our member organizations affect our agenda for the rest of the year?

InCommon Services/Projects

  • Community
    • CTAB, CACTI, and TAC have all provided clear feedback that we should restrict spinning up new things. 
    • Research & Scholarship Category - Chris Whalen (a contractor at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases which is part of NIH) contacted InCommon to promote R&S adoption in the wake of many collaborations spinning up related to COVID-19. In a week, 22 IdPs have done so. 
    • All training, including BaseCAMP, moving on-line for the rest of the year. Moving BaseCAMP is a pretty big lift.
  • Process changes
    • We’ve changed a business process that relied on an InCommon Exec’s published work phone number so to enable cell phone and home phone use
    • Online metadata signing - current process requires two individuals to be physically present to sign metadata. We were moving toward an AWS-based replacement, but have accelerated the move. It will be automated, but has the same integrity as the current process. The intended roll-out is April 8. 
    • InCommon updated the disaster recovery and business continuity plans (federation, certificates, eduroam) based on the pandemic.

InCommon TAC - Janemarie Duh

  • TAC took a hiatus for a month. The plan is to keep to the 2020 work plan, but schedules and deadlines might be more fluid. The IdP as a Service Working Group will continue, as they are almost finished. Other working groups will be chartered at a slower pace..

InCommon CTAB - David Bantz

  • CTAB has paused the community consensus process to gather feedback on the next round of Baseline Expectations. Comments are still accepted and the email list is still open.  It will be several weeks before we consider resuming the process. Considering holding open office hours.

CACTI - Tom Jordan

  • CACTI also was on hiatus, but plans to meet next week. A continuing work item is developing the federation value proposition pointed at CIO and CISOs. 
  • There are two proposed working groups. One would look at support and resources for hiring managers. The other would evaluate the InCommon Trusted Access Platform software and provide a comparison to popular commercial offerings. 

Kevin Morooney

  • Some questions he is considering: 
    • What do we do next year and the year after (T/I related) in terms of digitally facilitating and mediating trust in a way that wasn’t done before. 
    • Are our capabilities the right things? With the right depth and the right breadth? 
  • Profound change in economics that global shelter in place is impacting all aspects of what we do, what you all do.

  • We have useful capabilities but are they unevenly adopted? Don’t know if that’s the case, but might be.

Steering members posed a number of other challenges and opportunities

  • Exams and licensing tests - how do you identity proof people from afar?
    • Or will exams become open-note and open-book? (Note: open-note and -book exams may not alleviate the need for some entities to require validation of the identity of the exam taker.)
  • Telemedicine, telecounseling, and similar services may have similar needs
  • The security of Zoom has become very important and visible.
  • Campus redistribution of funds - collectively we’d better be able to make the case that this signals the need for an increase in IT investment, and that identity management is part of that

Next month - look at lessons learned and going forward.

Next Meeting - May 4, 2020


Next Meeting

Monday, May 4, 2020 - 4 pm ET / 3 pm CT / 2 pm MT / 1 pm PT


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