*MACE Conference Call*
February 6, 2006

*Attendees*

Bob Morgan (chair) - Washington
Keith Hazelton - Wisconsin
Lynn McRae - Stanford
Rodney McDuff - Queensland
Ton Verschuren - SURFnet
Tom Barton - Chicago
Steve Carmody - Brown
Steve Olshansky - Internet2

*Discussion*

Recent events:
- APAN now has a formal middleware effort. See http://www.apan.net/wg/middleware.htm for information, including how to subscribe to the mailing list. Presentations from the January APAN meeting in Tokyo are at http://www.apan.net/meetings/tokyo2006/proposals/apptech.html#hmw.
- CAMP Med took place January 25-27; see http://www.aamc.org/meetings/specmtgs/campmed06/start.htm. Bob noted that the attendees included a representative from SAFE (http://www.safe-biopharma.org/), which does PKI for the healthcare industry. As with HEPKI, the infrastructure for SAFE appears to be running well ahead of the applications.

Upcoming events:
- GGF is February 13-16 in Athens; see http://www.ggf.org/gf/event_schedule/.
- A draft program for the April 3-5 EuroCAMP is at http://www.terena.nl/activities/eurocamp/april06/docs/Programme-v1.pdf.
- The Identity Gang (http://www.identitygang.org/) is planning a second Internet Identity Workshop, tentatively May 2-3 in or near San Francisco.

The NMI-R8 version of eduPerson is almost final. The changes mainly involve clarifying the syntax for eduPersonPrincipalName, eduPersonScopedAffiliation, and eduPersonTargetedID. There has also been much discussion of attribute values, but there will be no changes in this area until at least the following version.

The Zagreb TF-EMC2 meeting sparked a new round of discussion of how to organize the increasingly global higher-education middleware effort. One possibility would be the formation of a MACE-like group on a global level, with the current MACE becoming a US-focused subgroup of it. Rodney noted that we need to get input from existing regional middleware organizations; there was general agreement. Bob suggested starting work on a roadmap, and noted eduroam and GGF as organizations that have experience with the issues involved in integrating regional and global middleware efforts.

Finally, Bob polled the group on campus needs for middleware standardization in the workflow area, in particular making use of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language; see http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsbpel). There appears to be widespread interest in using BPEL to further interoperability, but no one cited any pressing needs or ongoing projects in this area.