*MACE Conference Call*
February 5, 2007

*Attendees*

Bob Morgan (chair) - Washington
Lynn McRae - Stanford
Nate Klingenstein - Internet2
Neal McBurnett - Internet2
Steve Olshansky - Internet2
Leif Johansson- Stockholm/SUNET
Steve Carmody - Brown
Ann West - Internet2
David Wasley - independent
Rodney McDuff - Queensland
Ton Verschuren - SURFnet
Ken Klingenstein - Colorado/Internet2
Scott Cantor - OSU
Diego Lopez - RedIRIS
Ben Chinowsky (scribe) - Internet2

*Discussion*

Recent meetings:
- Nate gave a short report from SAINT. Other than in Australia, there is not much enterprise middleware work underway in the Asia-Pacific region. Bob noted that much of what there is revolves around PKI. Nate made a large number of contacts though, especially on the Grid side of things, and is pursuing the possibility of a Shibboleth CAMP and installfest in Japan later this year.
- Bob described a rather alarming vision he encountered at a University of Washington workshop on SOA. The presenter argued that the whole point of SOA is to have all communications between endpoints mediated by XML, munging identifiers so that your apps can be completely detached from any notions of security; to accomplish all this, you deploy middleboxes. Without disagreeing with Bob's characterization of this vision, Leif suggested that this may well be the way things are going.
- Ken was at OGF19. He noted that while progress is slow, some of the Grid stacks are starting to incorporate federated identity; in particular, UNICORE has just been Shibbolized. Most Grid developers are narrowly focused on keeping everything running so as not to interrupt ongoing scientific work; finding time to add middleware is a real problem.

Upcoming meetings:
- The inaugural meeting of the PESC e-Authentication/e-Authorization (EA2) Task Force is March 6 in DC; see http://www.pesc.org/workgroups/ea2%5Ftask%5Fforce/. Ken will be there.
- Bob is going to the March 28-29 TF-EMC2 meeting (http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-emc2/meetings/8/); he is still looking for other MACErs to join him.
- The 6th Annual PKI R&D Workshop (http://middleware.internet2.edu/pki07/) is April 17-19 at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD.
- OGF20 is May 7-11 in Manchester, UK; see http://www.ogf.org/OGF20/events_ogf20.php.

Bob noted that the ITU is forming an identity-management working group; this activity is being evangelized in the Identity Gang space. SAML has been accepted as an ITU standard, although this doesn't necessarily mean that competing standards won't be accepted as well.

Ken noted that CNI has invited MACE to send someone to an upcoming conference to talk about the benefits of federation for libraries.

Bob noted that Google is interested in Shibbolizing their applications-on-demand service. They are hoping to have SAML 1.1 / Shibboleth 1.3 support ready by this fall.

Finally, Ton noted that he is leaving SURFnet at the end of March; he is looking for someone from SURFnet to take his place on MACE.