MACE Call 5-December-2011

**MACE Call 5-December-2011**

**Attending**
RL "Bob" Morgan, U. Washington (chair)
Ken Klingenstein, Internet2
Renee Shuey, Penn State
Scott Cantor, The Ohio State U.
Michael Gettes, Carnegie Mellon U.
Jim Jokl, U. Virginia
Roland Hedberg, Umeå Universitet
Von Welch, Indiana U.
Chris Hubing, Penn State
Keith Hazelton, U. Wisconsin - Madison
Steven Carmody, Brown U.
Mark Scheible, MCNC
Jimmy Vuccolo, Penn State
David Wasley, Independent
David Bantz, U. Alaska
Valerie Vogel, Educause
Jens Haeusser, U. British Columbia
Ann West, Internet2
Steve Olshansky, Internet2 (scribe)

NEXT CALL: 19-December-2011

**Carryover Action Items**
[AI] (All) interested in participating in the OSIdM4HE effort contact Bob.
[AI] (All) discuss further ideas on IAM suite collaboration on the mailing list.
[AI] (All) send seedcorn suggestions to Ken.
[AI] (Ken) will distribute the CRU taxonomy of SPs
[AI] (Ken) will send out a link to relevant GENI IdM information.
[AI] (Keith) will write up the current state of the identifier discussion and apparent consensus, and associated explanatory material, for use by REFEDs.
[AI] (Ken) will coordinate a small working group with Heather to look into access control and IdM layer requirements for shared file services, calendaring, and web-conferencing in a federation-centric context.
[AI] (All) with suggestions for other foundations that the Shib Consortium could eventually be embedded in are encouraged to discuss them on the list.
[AI] (Ken) will convene a small subgroup of MACE to consider the seed corn issues in more depth and report back on a forthcoming call, soon.
[AI] (Ken) will invite Mike Conlon (U. Florida), the VIVO PI, to a forthcoming MACE call.
[AI] (Keith) will maintain an issues list to inform a potential new charter for MACE-DirNG, syncing it with the FedApps charter.
[AI] (RLBob, Scott, and SteveO) will proceed with the process of formalizing the FedApps working group, including setting up a list/wiki/website, and advertise it in the appropriate venues.
[AI] (Ken) will draft a one-pager about what MACE does and what questions it has, for review by MACE, as a discussion guide with Internet2 leadership.
[AI] (Ken) will distribute a draft requirements framework for VO support engagement
[AI] (David) will contact GSA for an update on the approval process for InCommon Silver.
[AI] (Ken) will send out info on DHS secure online transactions
[AI] (Ken) will follow up on a MACE/AMSAC call.
[AI] (Ken) will follow up with Kuali/Rice about I2MI collaboration.
[AI] (Ken) will draft a catalyst doc, covering the key items to be addressed in advising VOs how to use our infrastructure.
[AI] (Leif) will contact Ken/Steven/Tom about potential overlaps between the SDCI proposal and projects in the EU.
[AI] (Jens) will speak to an Eduroam rep about communicating with Educause.
[AI] (Ken) will draft and circulate a letter to Rice leadership, requesting input to roadmaps and use cases, and to ensure our projects with Kuali projects are aligned with their high-level strategic direction.
[AI] (Nate) will distribute information to the list about upcoming tactical issues facing MACE
[AI] (All) send Bamboo IAM comments to Tom ASAP for coordination.
[AI] (All) interested in participating in the international collaboration activity contact RL "Bob."
[AI] (RL "Bob") will contact a representative of Kuali Rice about coordinating a call.
[AI] (Ken and Mark) will distribute some information on trust anchors in the context of dynamic network configuration in GENI testbed, as well as for general access control.
[AI] (Ken) will circulate some meeting notes from the last TERENA/ REFEDS meetings.

**Discussion**
Topic: Overlapping efforts in R&HE IAM/federation. What might we want to improve?

* reducing conflict/overlap among projects
* better information about what's happening for interested (but not
full-time committed) parties
* better paths to more active participation in the many projects
* less reliance on a few stressed individuals to do all the linking
* clarifying the roles of various groups in the space

This topic of course comes up from time to time. There was enthusiasm for an info-clearinghouse of sorts coming out of the first Identity Services Summit in 2009. Such a thing is hard to sustain without dedicated resources. Is there a strategy for finding resources among all the potential orgs to help us collaborate better?

+++
There are two broad categories to address:
- Better coordinated planning of activity leaders, toward reducing duplication
- Better information flow to the interested community

The IAM Tools and Effective Practices working group has been doing work, including surveys and self-assessments, similar to efforts under way by other groups. This includes work on guest systems & social identities, and efforts to move ahead after the Oracle acquisition of Sun.
https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/iamtep/IAM+Tools+and+Effective+Practices

The challenges of different audiences, as well as funding restrictions, were also raised.

The TEP group is led by Mark Scheible.

http://www.educause.edu/iam

The leadership of the Educause IAM group is currently led by a steering committee, chaired by Christopher Duffy (Peirce College CIO), facilitated by Educause staff, and various subgroups occasionally spin up.

Given substantial overlap in membership among the various groups, it seems appropriate to utilize this overlap to improve communication between them. Perhaps also a RSS feed or similar from each group would be useful, to improve awareness across the groups.

It was noted that the Educause Advanced Core Technologies Initiative (ACTI) Campus Bridging Task Force touches on some IdM topics:
http://www.educause.edu/acti

The Educause Security CG list occasionally drifts into IAM topics, e.g. multi-factor authn. The issue of improving communication between security and IAM people is ongoing...

The forward edge of campuses, v. the bulk to follow, was also raised as a distinction that may impact the various groups, e.g. how do we improve the flow from the leading edge to those mid-pack?

The international aspects of these efforts is also a factor to consider, especially as it relates to other groups e.g. TERENA TF-EMC2, Jasig, and Kuali.

Perhaps focus on outreach/communication (including e.g. use cases) v. development of forward-looking best practices is a useful distinction for these groups.

An inventory of all relevant efforts would be a useful starting point, to flesh out sponsoring organizations (and any relevant constraints), common characteristics and then determine where overlaps appear. There was an effort along this line a couple years ago, including maturity levels of the various target audiences and participants. Perhaps this could be revived and updated.

Q: For leading edge use cases, these typically are used to generate tech requirements v. best practices. Perhaps there is a life-cycle of use cases that would be useful?
A: Yes, this would seem a useful approach...

The topic of an info-clearinghouse was raised, if there were enough people from each effort to sustain it. Maintenance is an obvious hurdle to overcome. as are potential omissions. Directing interested people to where specific topics are being addressed, with some useful analysis, would be a very useful thing. Even just pointing to various working groups and their charters, and topics being addressed, and how to participate, would be a relatively simple but useful start.

If we had a common blog that several people would post to regularly, with e.g. monthly observations of recent activities, might be a good solution in the near term. Also an e-mail PoC for submissions would be useful, as might social networking tools like Facebook or Google+.

Brown potentially has a federated WordPress blog that could be used. Roland offered to wrangle the European updates. Valerie and Mark could wrangle updates from the Educause side of the house.

Since not all of these efforts are open to anyone interested, and IPR issues may be an issue for some groups as well (e.g. those focused around a particular vendor), it would be useful for those groups to publish occasional summaries if possible.

Occasional calls (quarterly?) among the various groups as a touchpoint were proposed, toward the goal of dividing the work on various topics being addressed by multiple groups. RL "Bob" volunteered to chair calls,

Glossaries also seem to be duplicative, and in some cases contradictory based upon their contexts. While a common glossary may not be practical, even just aggregating links to the various versions would be useful. A crowd-sourced IAM-opedia was proposed as a potentially useful effort.

There will be another similar coordination call March 2012. A wiki space will be setup as at least a starting point for inventorying the various IAM activities, and RL "Bob" and Mark will coordinate.