InCommon TAC 2019 Work Plan

This is final version of the InCommon Technical Advisory Committee's 2019 work plan. The TAC provides recommendations related to the technical operation and management of InCommon. The work plan outlines the proposed technical priorities, particularly for the InCommon Federation.

If you have a new work item to propose, please copy the Template below and paste at the bottom of the work items, filling in a title and brief high-level description.

Alternatively, if you would like to comment on any of the existing items, please add a comment to the wiki page. Note that you need to sign into Confluence in order to edit or leave a comment.

Lastly, if you have a work item you'd like to propose but aren't comfortable using the wiki editor, enter it in the comments at the bottom of the page.

 The areas under consideration (and detailed below) are:

2019 First Half

Working Groups

  1. IdP as a Service (IdPaaS) Working Group
    1. Community requirements gathering and recommendations for an InCommon-branded hosted solution

    2. Will likely help with the Long Tail and R&S

    3. Requires participation by cohorts that don’t usually participate

    4. Vendors will be involved

    5. Wiki space with charter and list info
  2. Federation 2.0 (REFEDS) Working Group

    1. TAC member Judith Bush (OCLC) is co-chair

    1. TAC participation

    2. Wiki and meeting notes

  3. OIDC/OAuth Deployment Working Group

Other Work Items

  1. RA21

    1. Assess the “fit” of an InCommon-run IdP discovery persistence service

    2. Update 5/16: GEANT will be hosting a beta service; circle back when beta launches
  2. FIM4R Recommendations for InCommon

    1. Invest in Areas to Support Collaboration-as-a-Service

    2. Increase Focus on Sustainability Practices

    3. Increase Research Representation in All Levels of FIM Governance

    1. Responding to the requirements of researchers, a key audience

    2. Will help with IdPs not providing attributes to R&S SPs

    3. IdPaaS might meet some of the recommendations

  3. Collaboration with CACTI/CTAB

    1. Representatives (not chairs) to attend meetings

    2. Update 5/16: completed

2019 Second Half

The work items for the second half of 2019 are:

  1. Follow up to the Streamlining SP Onboarding Working Group

  2. Follow up to the Attributes for Collaboration and Federation Working Group

    1. The TAC is reviewing the draft of InCommon’s response to the above two groups through February

    2. Update 5/23: The recommendations the above two working groups made are planned or underway InCommon work items
  3. Deployment Profile Working Group

    1. Follow up after hiatus and Kantara ratification of revised SAML2int

    2. Create an R&E specific profile to layer on top of SAML2int

      1. Update 5/23: Likely kick-off in September/October
      2. Update 9/19: Item moved to draft 2020 plan
    3. Might factor into Baseline, badging, automated testing
  4. Development of a test InCommon federation
    1. Working group to be chartered for requirements gathering late or early 2020
    2. Update 9/19: Item moved to draft 2020 plan
  5. Badging for Participants and maturity model outline for adoption of federation technologies and protocols
    1. Update 5/23: A sub-group with members of CTAB and TAC is working on this
  6. Address new TAC member onboarding and communication gaps

Parking Lot

  1. SAML SP front end

    1. SPs that don’t play nice with InCommon and SAML

    2. Might get addressed later in Federation 2.0

  2. ADFS as an IdP

    1. Requirements gathering, centralizing documentation, potentially working with Microsoft to implement changes/requirements

    2. IdPaaS work could make this moot

    3. In the spring, CAF and SWAMID starting using ADFSToolkit, which augments ADFS

(Template for New Proposed Work Item)

High-level description of new work item.


Suggestion/Action Item

Comments or ElaborationName, Organization