Service Provider Study Results
At the May 2011 meeting of REFEDS in Prague, Nicole carried out a survey based on the recommendations of the 'Barriers to Service Providers' report. The results are shown below with recommendations for how the work will now be carried forward.
As a level of assessment, activities with 70% support or more will be taken forward.
Cross-federation supporting documentation for eduGain
Participants were asked if REFEDS should produce supporting documentation for eduGAIN aimed at entities, explaining how eduGAIN works, how to go about opting-in to eduGAIN and how to manage and understand who is consuming your metadata.
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Action: Nicole to work with Mikael and Valter to create appropriate documentation, TERENA to produce with REFEDS branding.
Clearer interpretation of federation policies
There was unanimous support for defining core functions of federation policies and mapping these to different federations using creative commons style symbols to indicate meaning.
Action: Nicole to analyse and define key policy areas and to identify an organisation to help create the symbols.
One-off clauses within federation agreements and sponsorship letters
89% of participants were supportive of REFEDS writing to federations that currently have unusual clauses within their federation agreements explaining the barriers to SPs work and asking for further information as to why they chose to use such a clause.
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Action: Nicole and Licia to draft letters after the work analysing federation policies is complete.
Funding models
83% of participants were supportive of establishing a list of 'friends of REFEDS' and asking federations to wave fees in the case of such providers.
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Action: REFEDS to monitor the impact on federation revenue models as eduGAIN becomes embedded.
Technical areas
86% of participants agreed that REFEDS should collate central information about the software supported by federations. 100% supported a lightweight survey to provide recommendations on certificate usage within federations.
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