Questions for the InCommon Executive to Consider Regarding eduGAIN Adoption
Who should consider international interfederation?
- Higher ed and research organizations that have faculty, staff, researchers, scientists, and/or students involved with an international project.
- Organizations participating in a research or educational project that includes collaborators from other countries.
- Service Providers that offer collaboration tools, databases, or online services to 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 international interfederation?
For Identity Providers
Adopting eduGAIN will help provide a seamless user experience as faculty, researchers, staff, and students 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.
Am I required to interact with all international organizations?
No. Interfederation only means that such partnerships are possible. Just as you do today, you will continue to choose whether or not to federate with a partner.
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. Note that the InCommon metadata file will become much larger and some federating software, such as SimpleSAMLphp, may need to be updated to accommodate the larger file (if you use Shibboleth, this is not an issue).
Your organization may choose to filter the expanded InCommon metadata aggregate, which will create some additional work initially. 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.
What does InCommon recommend?
The development of the plan for interfederating has had extensive involvement by the community, including three working groups, the InCommon Technical Advisory Committee, an ad hoc group of campus attorneys, and the InCommon Steering Committee. For that reason, InCommon recommends that all participating organizations accept the modifications to the Participation Agreement, which will enable interfederation. Once you have done that, there are a variety of technical methods you can use to participate (or not) in interfederation, and control that participation.