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News: Registration is now open for the 2014 Quilt InCommon Federation Workshop. The planning page for the 2014 workshop is here.
Introduction
Limited resources, skill sets, or federation experience often prevent smaller institutions from joining an Identity Federation. This is especially true for K-12 school districts and smaller higher education institutions such as community or technical colleges. R&E Network providers or "Regionals" (members of The Quilt) and InCommon are working to bridge this gap by exploring how to extend federation services to these communities.
2013 Quilt InCommon Federation Workshop
A Quilt / InCommon Federation Workshop was held at the Winter Quilt Meeting in February 2013 to develop a framework for a distributed federation model. This would leverage the Regionals to extend the InCommon Federation to these smaller educational institutions, as well as into other sectors. The framework would describe methods of providing these communities (starting with educational institutions) with Identity and Access Management and Federation Services, as well as federation consulting and other forms of support. A set of pilot proposals involving K-12 and/or Community Colleges were solicited from the Regionals to test and validate these models/methods and to create Case Studies of the selected pilots which could be used to inform additional (possibly larger) pilots or projects.
Pilot Work Emerging from the 2013 Workshop
At the conclusion of the workshop, it was agreed it would make sense to ask the participants to continue the dialog by joining three working groups focused on the pilots:
- InCommon-Quilt Pilot Definition Working Group - This group would define the requirements for the pilots and develop a call for participants (CFP) and pilot timelines
- InCommon-Quilt Technical Working Group - This group would further develop the federation models discussed during the workshop outlining the pros and cons for regionals to consider and coordinate with the InCommon TAC (Technical Advisory Committee) Interfederation group
- InCommon-Quilt Admin/Policy Working Group - This group would document the distributed administration tasks and roles outlined during the workshop and identity the key policy issues and business models that would need to be addressed in the pilots as well as for ongoing federation.
All three Working Groups met on a regular basis after the 2013 workshop completed, to help launch the pilots. As of early 2014, the Pilot-Definition Working Group was continuing to meet; the other two working groups had completed their work.
Initial Pilots
Eight pilot activities are currently under way, and are being led by the organizations below. It is anticipated that there will be subsequent pilot phases, still in the early planning stage.
- MCNC (North Carolina)
- Merit (Michigan)
- NCSA & IlliniCloud, Collaborators and the Technical Partners for the Illinois Shared Learning Environment (ISLE)
- OARnet (Ohio)
- WiscNet (Wisconsin)
Read the October 2013 Press Release about the pilots. More details will be forthcoming as they progress.
Quilt/InCommon K12/Community College Grant
To encourage experimentation and adoption of federated identity and access management among K12 and community colleges, InCommon is offering a grant to the pilot projects currently underway. For details, click to read more about the Quilt/InCommon K12/Community College Grant
InCommon/Quilt Federation Pilot Development Project
(includes a link to the pilot Readiness Assessment)
InCommon/Quilt Technical Working Group
(Documents and diagrams describing federation models and possible tools for Regionals and State Systems to use for interfederating with InCommon)
InCommon Quilt Administrative & Policy Working Group
(under development)
Reference Documents:
- Use Cases (seeking more...)
- Digital Identity Management for K-20 Education (pdf)
Ann West (Internet2/InCommon), Renee Shuey (Penn State U.) and Shaun Abshere (WiscNet), published in the 2007 CoSN Compendium.
The following document is a member-only publication from CoSN, the professional association of school district technology leaders. It is provided as a courtesy to the community to advance the conversation. Join CoSN at www.cosn.org/membership - K-12 Obstacles to Federation
- Relationships between K-12 and Higher Education (Slides) - Reasons for Federation
- 2013 Workshop Summary and Next Steps (pdf)
- Project Terminology
- National K-12 Federated Identity and Access Management Task ForceIn order to encourage experimentation and adoption of federated identity and access management among K12 and community colleges, InCommon would like to offer the following to the pilot projects currently underway.