InCommon Technical Advisory Committee Minutes
October 15, 2015
Attending: David Walker, Keith Hazelton, Steve Carmody, Tom Barton, Jim Jokl, Ian Young, Chris Misra, Jim Basney, Michael Gettes, Scott Cantor
With: Dean Woodbeck, Nate Klingenstein, Steve Zoppi, Tom Scavo, IJ Kim, Paul Caskey, Ann West
Minutes from past meetings
The minutes from October 1, 2015, and October 7, 2015, were approved.
SirTiFi Working Group
Tom Barton reported on the SirTiFi Working Group. He and Jim Basney are members, along with a number of members from Europe. This group is working, in part, on federated incident handling under the REFEDS banner and has finalized work on the first public draft of the “SirTiFi trust framework,” a set of statements to which an organization can self-attest. The draft will go through the REFEDS consultation process. SirTiFI also intends to create guidance for federations on incident response.
Also, Jim Basney will attend the first Wise workshop, “WIse Information Security for collaborating E-infrastructures,” sponsored by the GEANT info security group. He also mentioned that InCommon now has 210 security contacts in metadata, a good start toward the requirements for federated incident handling.
TAC’s Role and Charter
Steve Carmody shared his notes from the October 7, 2015, TAC meeting, specifically about the discussion about the role of TAC as it related to InCommon operations and broader strategic planning.
There was a wide-ranging discussion concerning the best way to organize to provide nimble feedback for InCommon operations, strategic technical planning for InCommon, interaction with TIER, and community involvement and transparency. The discussion centered on how the number of groups needed, how they might be structured and populated, and their respective roles.
One strawman put forward involves three groups: one to advise Ops, a Community Architecture Planning and Engagement (CAPE) group that would guide InCommon and TIER technical strategy, and a third to look at integrating US work with international and other sectors.
At the October 7 meeting, the consensus seemed to support one group that would be relatively deep on experience and relatively small in number. This group would provide feedback on operations. Membership would be weighted toward “permanent” members with the necessary expertise, but with some rotating representative members. The other group would look at the full range of activities in InCommon (and internationally) and consider issues that span trust and identity. Membership would be weighted toward rotating representatives from the community, with a small number of permanent members based on expertise. Both groups would lean toward transparency (understanding that some ops things can’t be divulged).
In all of these cases, InCommon would continue to provide communications in a timely and structured manner, just as is done today.
There was a concern raised about taking too narrow a view when using terms like “InCommon operations.” Does that mean the technical federation operations focused on the metadata, or is it more broad, meaning the range of activities and responsibilities of the InCommon staff?
Any solution should also consider that there will be overlap. The Federation Interoperability Working Group was cited as an example. It was created as an InCommon roadmap item that we create a way to test and bless services. The group’s work is both operational (develop a testing service) as well as strategic (defining what to test).
Next steps will be to agree on the advisory groups that are needed, their roles, and then define membership.
Next Meeting - October 29, 2015 - 2 pm ET