*MACE Conference Call*
June 14, 2004

*Attendees*

Bob Morgan (chair) - Washington
Steven Carmody - Brown
Ton Verschuren - SURFnet
Jim Jokl - Virginia
David Wasley - UCOP
Renee Frost - Michigan/Internet2
Mark Poepping - CMU
Keith Hazelton - Wisconsin
Tom Barton - Chicago
Neal McBurnett - Internet2
Ben Chinowsky (scribe) - Internet2

*Discussion*

The group reviewed developments at the June 7-10 TERENA Networking Conference (http://www.terena.nl/conferences/tnc2004/):
- TF-AACE -- TERENA's MACE analogue -- is expanding its activities under the proposed new name of "EMC2" (European Middleware Coordination 2). The larger issue of global middleware coordination is also on people's minds. The TERENA Technical Committee has approved a charter for EMC2; some of EMC2's numerous activities will be funded by JRA5, which in turn is part of the GN2 effort, to be launched September 1.
- There was lots of discussion of mobility issues, inter-NREN authentication in particular. Inter-NREN authentication was used successfully at the conference.
- Many new Shibboleth deployments are underway; the K-12 system in the UK is on the verge of rolling out Shibboleth. A recommendation on what to put behind Shibboleth is still in the works, as there's no broad agreement here. Bob suggested that "different ones for different reasons" might be the right answer. SURFnet's A-Select is going to be Apache-licensed in US in the next few weeks.
- SURFnet Detective (formerly known as NREN Detective) has just been publicly released; see http://detective.surfnet.nl/en/index_en.html. This customizable tool is used to answer questions about the capabilities of the network a user is on, e.g., "Can they do multicast?", "Are they behind a firewall?" Bob noted that while, strictly speaking, this is not middleware, it has clear relevance to the middleware diagnostics work; he suggested there could be extensions to answer questions like "Can you get to this web server with this kind of access?"
- Sympa was represented at the TERENA meeting; they are also planning a workshop at the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting. Bob is working on a document about new schema needed for Sympa.
- JISC is organizing a meeting on trust in the UK in October. The plan is to get Shibboleth deployers to compare notes with people from InCommon and other federations, search for commonalities, and work on creating interconnections.
- Ken is promoting the idea of a European version of CAMP, in particular to discuss deployment of authN and authZ infrastructure. Rough timeframe is Spring 2005.

An extensive discussion of the pros and cons of various ways of ensuring global uniqueness in the MACE URN namespace is underway on the MACE-Dir and MACE-courseID lists. Keith is documenting use cases for MACE-courseID; watch http://middleware.internet2.edu/courseID/ for a draft.