InCommon Steering Committee Meeting - October 7, 2019

Minutes

Attending: Melissa Woo, Von Welch, Mike Erickson, Pankaj Shah, Marty Ringle, Dee Childs, Ted Hanss, Christine Miki, Brad Christ, Janemarie Duh, Sean Reynolds, Laura Paglione

With: Steve Zoppi, Kevin Morooney, Albert Wu

Action Items

(AI) Steering members attending EDUCAUSE - talk up the openings on InCommon Steering.

Nominations

The call for nominations for all InCommon advisory and governing groups went out last week. There is a need for additional Steering nominees. Please review the list and, if you are going to EDUCAUSE, plan to talk to your colleagues about serving. 

Steering will continue to maintain the research advisor role, but having a legal advisor is no longer necessary.

Face-to-Face at TechEx

InCommon Steering will meet face-to-face at TechEx (3-5 pm Monday, December 9). Trust and Identity PAG members and past members of Steering will also be invited to participate.

The agenda will include some or all of these topics:

• Revisit research organization eligibility requirements
• Review the 2020 plans from TAC, CTAB, CACTI, and staff
• Consider ways to demonstrate success with the additional funds made available by the fee increase
• Building the business case for IAM driven by higher education - convincing Provosts and CFOs that this area needs investing, telling the story of the Trust Access Platform benefits vis a vis commercial offerings
• Expansion of eduroam to be a ubiquitous SSID nationally
• What does success look like for InCommon when we reflect back in December 2020?

Federation Manager and Metadata Query Service

Albert Wu joined this meeting to provide information about the Federation Manager and the Metadata Query Service. The presentation included:

• Reviewing the concept and purpose of metadata and its centrality to the federation trust fabric

• A review of the Federation Manager - the tool site administrators manage and update metadata
  • Improved self-service - executive portal
  • automation via API for automated metadata submission - important for those supporting many service providers
  • Help for newcomers
  • Better tracking of continuing compliance with Baseline Expectations
• Many changes since 2017
• Minor metadata changes are now automatically approved
• More friendly user interface
• Moving to AWS and using a DevOps approach to deploy changes as they happen
• Enforcing and facilitating compliance with Baseline Expectations
• Coming changes include:
• MDQ - Metadata Query Service (or Per-Entity Metadata Service)
• The current metadata distribution service via an aggregate is now more than 65MB in size, which is causing some problems given the time it takes to load
• MDQ is like DNS - you query only for the data you need
• Shibboleth now supports this out of the box
• InCommon has MDQ in operation as a release candidate, with a number of early adopters participating. The official launch of the service will happen around the time of TechEx 2019, with the goal of migrating everyone to this service by fall 2020. The UK Federation already uses MDQ.
  

Next Meeting

Monday, November 4, 2019, 4 pm ET / 3 pm CT / 2 pm MT / 1 pm PT