TAC Meeting 2017-05-25 Minutes
TAC Members Attending: Steve Carmody, Mark Scheible, MIke Grady, Eric Goodman, Janemarie Duh, Tom Mitchell, Jim Jokl, Keith Wessel, Tom Barton, Kim Milford, Steve Carmody, Albert Wu
With: Dean Woodbeck, David Walker, Nick Roy, Tom Scavo, Steve Zoppi, IJ Kilm, Mike LaHaye
Action Items from May 25
(AI) TAC members asked to review the list of entities being filtered by MDA v7 to try to determine whether any of these are well-known or suspected highly used entities. (AI) Tom Barton will check with Jim Basney on this, as well.
(AI) Mark Schieble will revise the Attributes for Collaboration and Federation WG charter for additional review and send it to technical-discuss.
(AI) Ann or Kevin talk with Klaas Weirenga from GÉANT about a presentation to TAC meeting concerning their T&I roadmap for, say, the next 3 years?
(AI) Janemarie will send a note to TAC after she revises the charter for the Streamlining SP Onboarding WG.
(AI) Janemarie will move the information from her email concerning flywheels and co-chairs to a Google doc for collaborative editing/commenting - DONE
Uncompleted AIs from past calls
(AI) Kim Milford will promote the technical-discuss list among the REN-ISAC community - DONE
(AI) Mark Scheible and Ann West will develop an executive summary of the OIDC Survey WG report and recommendations for the InCommon Steering Committee. - Being Reviewed
(AI) Tom S will send a note to technical-discuss kicking off a discussion about requiring HTTPS endpoints for SPs - Postponed until Fall due to implementation resource requirements
(AI) Mark/Nick will start a discussion on the technical-discuss list about the Discovery 2.0 work plan item. Perhaps focus the discussion on use cases with a goal of a REFEDS discussion at TechEx.
Ops Update - Tom Scavo
March 10 incident response (eduGAIN changing the order of entities broke things) - tested code base to ensure the incident response and the MDA v7 were doing what we wanted them to do. The incident response piece worked as expected, but there was a bug in the v7 portion. As a result, went back to v6, made the change in entity ordering in v6, and deployed that to production and is working as intended. This resolves the incident response.
InCommon MDA v7 - the v7 bug is an easy fix. The fix is ready, but ops is determinig how to proceed. There were 41 entities filtered by v7; 17 of those because of the bug. InCommon would not be the only federation filtering out these entities; the UK federation already does.
Tom asked - assuming there will be a few entities filtered (probably around 10), should we proceed with this project? There is a list of the affected entities and the issue causing the filtering. (AI) TAC members asked to review this list to see if any well-known or suspected highly used entities are among the list. (AI) Tom Barton will check with Jim Basney on this, as well.
Federation Manager Software Release (Nick)
The 2.0 release went smoothly. This is a milestone for InCommon, as all of the work was done by contractors. The changes are mainly for RA-facing, but participants will see some minor changes in the interface.
The next release this summer will have more impact on participants and will involve a more extensive communication plan
Trust and Identity Updates (Nick)
Hiring - should have one hire to announce soon and interviews coming for two additional positions
Nick, Ann, Ken will be at TNC next week. Will be a REFEDS meeting among others. The program is at tnc17.geant.org. Let one of them know if you have people/issues they might sync with.
One topic to make note of - Discovery 2.0 - Nick ask around at REFEDS about this. (AI) Ann or Kevin talk with Klaas Weirenga from GÉANT about a presentation to TAC meeting concerning their T&I roadmap for, say, the next 3 years.
Working Groups
Attributes for Collaboration and Federation (Mark) - This has become a joint effort with InCommon Steering and the InCommon AAC, since both have an interest in this topic. Leaders of those groups plus Mark met with Ann to discuss how this joint working group would proceed. Instead of an open call, we will seek representation from specific stakeholders, including Steering, TAC, AAC, registrars (2), CIO, research SP, Internet2 staff, TIER, researcher, risk management, plus occasionally inviting people with specific expertise (like FERPA). The draft roadmap on improving R&S release presented to Steering, will also be considered. (AI) Mark will revise the charter and have Ann/Sean/Brett review prior to sending it to technical-discuss
SP Configuration Standards (Janemarie) - New name is Streamlining SP Onboarding WG. The group will work on a body of standards to help SPs onboard into the InCommon Federation. Charter language now focuses more on SPs. Removed references to testing (that was not in scope). Goals are more narrowly defined and enumerated. CIC Cloud Services Cookbook is the starting point. (AI) Janemarie will send a note to TAC after the next charter revision.
OIDC (Steven) - All comments have been incorporated into the charter. There are both campus activities and federation activities. It is not clear where these overlap or don’t. [Might be similar to the approach with Shibboleth - that covers both of those cases] Perhaps include in the charter a statement - “this is the future vision of how these two efforts (TIER SW and Federation) might play out.”
Change to chair/flywheel roles/process
Just prior to the meeting, Janemarie emailed TAC a proposal that clarifies the roles of working group flywheels and chairs, as well as a change to co-chairs for working groups.
Flywheel role is administrative and the flywheel does not serve as a subject-matter expert nor as a resource to develop white papers, final reports, etc.
Working groups would have co-chairs to build in redundancy and to share the workload
The co-chairs would be responsible for writing the WG final report and any other related documentation
The flywheel would pay attention to the progress of the group. If work is lagging or other problems arise, the flywheel would discuss the issues with the co-chairs and the chartering organization (e.g. the TAC sponsor)
Comments
There have been times when flywheels do the bulk of the writing because group members have not been able to carve out the time (answer - the co-chair concept is an attempt to help that situation)
There needs to be acknowledgement that flywheels have multiple responsibilities with Internet2. The proposal is a clarification of the current general procedure - that flywheels are not SMEs.
In the past, TAC has used a template for drafting WG charters, which included a section to identify the anticipated resources needed. It would be helpful to use that template again
(AI) Janemarie will move the information from her email to a Google doc for collaborative editing/commenting.