*MACE Conference Call*
August 21, 2006

*Attendees*

Keith Hazelton (acting chair) - Wisconsin
Paul Hill - MIT
David Wasley - independent
Scott Cantor - OSU
Leif Johansson - Stockholm / SUNET
Neal McBurnett - Internet2
Steve Olshansky - Internet2
Jim Jokl - Virginia
Steve Carmody - Brown
Nate Klingenstein - Internet2
Lynn McRae - Stanford
Mark Poepping - CMU
Ton Verschuren - SURFnet
Ben Chinowsky (scribe) - Internet2

*Discussion*

Upcoming meetings:
- There will be a CAMP on "Building a Distributed Access Management Infrastructure" November 7-9 in Denver; see http://www.educause.edu/camp064. Lynn noted that there will be a strong focus on integration, with discussion of Signet and Grouper combined throughout.
- The Internet2 Fall Member Meeting is December 4-7 in Chicago; see http://events.internet2.edu/2006/fall-mm/. Planned middleware topics include inter-federations, state and national federations, workflow, integration, and cyberinfrastructure and virtual organizations. Keith noted that the intent is to have most of the middleware sessions consist of deployers telling their stories, rather than the MACE evangelism that has predominated at previous meetings. There is particular interest in hearing from people who are implementing the MACE model using commercial software for all or part of their solution.
- Keith noted that the Manila APAN will be immediately preceded by the Jan. 15-19 Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT2007) meeting in Hiroshima, Japan. Keith will be attending both meetings. MACErs are encouraged to submit papers for the SAINT2007 middleware session; the CFP is at http://www.net.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/saint2007-middleware/.

The eAuth/InCommon interoperability work is moving forward slowly. Steve Carmody is co-chairing the technical working group and David Wasley is chairing the policy working group. The current timeline calls for work in September to focus on the legal aspects. Steve is hoping to demo campus access at the Internet2 Member Meeting in December.

The eAuth/InCommon discussion led into a discussion on the future of inter-federations more generally. The main difficulty is in developing metadata services and the advanced PKIs needed to support them; the eduGAIN infrastructure is in the vanguard here. The eduGAIN cookbook will be publicly available soon, and Ton sent the group a close-to-final version for review.

Paul gave a short overview of the workflow effort, and sent out information about the mailing list and wiki set up in the wake of the June workflow CAMP. Paul suggested that MACE focus on the inter-organizational component of workflow -- "status checking" -- and on integration with Signet and Grouper, and that we start with business cases and the information that needs to be passed among organizations in those business cases. David suggested drawing on the discipline of project management for ideas on how to move forward with workflow.