Questions for the InCommon Executive to Consider Regarding eduGAIN Adoption
Who should consider eduGAIN and global interfederation?
- Higher ed and research organizations (Identity Providers) that have faculty, staff, researchers, scientists, and/or graduate students on your campus involved with an international project.
- Organizations participating in a grant funded by NSF or NIH that includes collaborators from other countries.
- Service Providers that consist of collaboration tools, databases, or online services with a global audience.
- Campuses offering courses that are co-taught with an international partner.
Basically, any Identity Provider with a faculty or staff member involved in an international collaboration and any Service Provider serving a global audience will benefit.
Why should I consider eduGAIN and global interfederation?
For Identity Providers
Adopting eduGAIN will help provide a seamless user experience as faculty, researchers and scientists access global databases, wikis, restricted websites, and other collaboration tools and services. These important members of your community can use their home credentials to access such services, improving the user experience and enhancing security, since they won’t need to create multiple accounts for various services.
For Service Providers:
Your clients and customers can use credentials from their home institutions to access your service. This means that 1) you can leverage your InCommon participation to serve a global clientele by opting to have your metadata included in eduGAIN, and 2) you do not have to create and maintain credentials for users who participate in any eduGAIN member federation.
What policy decisions and choices will we need to make?
The InCommon Participation Agreement and the InCommon FOPP (Federation Operating Policies and Practices) have both been revised, with the changes taking effect on February 7, 2016. To take advantage of international interfederation, your organization must accept the changes to the Participation Agreement and the FOPP (Federation Operating Policies and Practices).
Please not that your current Participation Agreement remains in effect, so any changes you negotiated before signing remain. Think of these changes as amendments, as opposed to a brand new document.
Here are your choices:
- If you agree to the changed documents, you can let us know, or you can remain silent. This means you agree to the changes, which go into effect Feb. 7, 2016, and you can participate in eduGAIN.
- If you wish to propose changes to your Participation Agreement, you can complete a webform that will place your request in a queue. Until your proposal is resolved, your organization cannot take advantage of eduGAIN. Please note that InCommon has little ability to make modifications to the Participation Agreement for individual participants, unless such modifications are required by law.
- If you object to the changes made to the documents, your current Participation Agreement will remain in effect, although your organization will not be able to benefit from international federation via eduGAIN.
If I export my Identity Provider metadata to eduGAIN, am I required to interact with all international service providers?
No. Exporting only means that such partnerships are possible. You will continue to choose whether or not to federate with a partner. Sometimes such interactions require a contract; other times just a release of a set of attributes. In any case, such decisions continue to be made locally.
If I export my Service Provider metadata to eduGAIN, must I make my service available to all international Identity Providers?
No. Exporting only means that such partnerships are possible. You will continue to choose whether or not to federate with a partner. Sometimes such interactions require a contract; other times just a release of a set of attributes. In any case, such decisions continue to be made locally.
What will interfederation mean for my staff’s workload?
Initially, there may be additional work, depending on some of the choices that you make. It could be as little as a site administrator checking a box on the Federation Manager web interface. Here are a couple of other considerations:
The InCommon metadata file will become much larger, owing to the addition of all of the identity and service providers from other federations. Some federating software, such as SimpleSAMLphp, may need to be updated to accommodate the larger file (if your institution’s IdP and/or SPs use Shibboleth, this is not an issue).
The InCommon metadata aggregate will now include identity providers and service providers from all 40 (and growing) eduGAIN member federations. For a current list of eduGAIN members, see: https://technical.edugain.org/status.php
Your organization may choose to filter the expanded InCommon metadata aggregate in coordination with its choices around export to eduGAIN. As an example, InCommon is adding a tag, "Registered by InCommon," to all of the Identity Providers and Service Providers in the federation. That tag can be used as a filter. Implementing the use of filters will require additional work and InCommon will provide guidance in this area.