*MACE Conference Call*
March 21, 2005

*Attendees*

Bob Morgan (chair) - Washington
Neal McBurnett - Internet2
Ton Verschuren - SURFnet
Michael Gettes - Duke
Steven Carmody - Brown
Keith Hazelton - Wisconsin
Scott Cantor - OSU
Lynn McRae - Stanford
Paul Hill - MIT
Tom Barton - Chicago
Ken Klingenstein - Colorado/Internet2
Steve Olshansky - Internet2
Ben Chinowsky (scribe) - Internet2

*Discussion*

Recent meetings:
- Bob noted that Brian Carpenter is now IETF Chair, replacing Harald Alvestrand. Attendance at the recent IETF was only 1100, the lowest since 1996; this was cause for concern among some, and for hope that it would be easier to get things done among others.
- The first E-Auth inter-federation meeting took place last week in DC, yielding progress toward increased understanding on policy issues. Each participating government agency is expected to have at least one E-Auth-compliant application up by the end of September, so motivation is high; monthly meetings are planned from now until then.
- Following up on CAMP Med, Bob and Keith attended a caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid; http://cabig.nci.nih.gov/) meeting in Seattle last week. Keith noted that MACE's work overlaps with theirs in the areas of security and access management; they are particularly interested in the GridShib work. Bob suggested recruiting someone from caBIG for the upcoming Virtual Organizations CAMP. BRIITE (the Biomedical Research Institutions Information Technology Exchange; https://www.briite.org/) meets in November, and there is interest in caBIG in starting work on a joint effort between now and then. Also, Michael noted that the Fox Chase Cancer Center (http://www.fccc.edu/) has sent people to several recent CAMPs.
- Ken met with NSF last Friday. They want the three universities that have been CAF'd to stand up E-Auth-compliant FastLane access by July 31; as the assessments were largely positive, this goal seems to be within reach.

Upcoming meetings:
- Bob and Steven are attending the second annual Mellon open source retreat next week; see http://rit.mellon.org:8080/dev/blog.
- The eduRoam summit is tentatively scheduled for May 5-6, immediately following the Internet2 Member Meeting. The plan is to gather an international group to work out the technical aspects, and from that develop policy concerns to forward to the appropriate people. Michael is organizing this from the Internet2 side. [AI] Bob and Steven will confer about which of them should attend the eduRoam summit.
- Bob noted that the Digital ID World conference (http://www.digitalidworld.com/conference/2005/) is coming up May 9-12.

Primarily because of issues with the eduAux auxiliary object class, the MACE-CourseID documents for NMI-R7 are not yet final; [AI] Keith will notify MACE when the revised MACE-CourseID documents are posted. Ken noted the relevance of the CourseID work to the Sakai enterprise authorization group; this led into a broader discussion of the potential usefulness of MACE middleware to Mellon-supported projects more generally. Steven noted that Australian participants in the DSpace project (http://www.dspace.org/) are already picking up MACE middleware code. A list of Mellon-supported projects is at http://tandt.mellon.org/.

The group discussed plans for an international MACE-affiliated policy and marketing group. This group will coordinate Shibboleth and other MACE middleware development at the "investor" level, helping the middleware efforts in each country to choose areas of work that complement work elsewhere rather than duplicating effort. Ken has talked to likely participants from several countries, and people are anxious to get started. MACE agreed that its relationship with the new group should be kept informal, and in particular that "MACE" should not be part of the new group's name. At the same time, there will be some overlap of membership. [AI] Ken will circulate a preliminary list of members of the new international middleware coordination group.

Finally, the group briefly discussed the three-tier problem; Bob suggested that deciding on a threat model is the main issue involved in tackling this. [AI] Scott will try to make some contacts with OCLC on the three-tier problem.

*Action Items*

[AI] Bob and Steven will confer about which of them should attend the eduRoam summit.
[AI] Keith will notify MACE when the revised MACE-CourseID documents are posted.
[AI] Ken will circulate a preliminary list of members of the new international middleware coordination group.
[AI] Scott will try to make some contacts with OCLC on the three-tier problem.