REF14-1: REFEDS Coordination and Management

This work item is the hub at the centre of REFEDS and represents the work to keep the group moving forward organisationally and administratively. It also manages the communications efforts for REFEDS. Increasingly, as REFEDS produces more outputs, there will be a need for the effort in this work area to increase to support lightweight maintenance of outputs.

Licia Florio and Nicole Harris will carry out work in this area with support from in-house staff at TERENA.

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REF14-2: Assurance and Policy

This workpackage will take the ground-work developed in 2013 to create a set of Federation Operator Practice Statements for REFEDS. These will be proposed as defining documentation for a base level of assurance that all federations should reach in order to be considered a formal Research and Education Federation.

The Federation Operator Practice Statements will include:

Due to the increasing interest in assurance, REFEDS will also establish a cross-organisational working group on LOA during the year. This will include representatives from GEANT, Kantara, ISOC and other interested parties. The goal of this group will be to discuss and formulate requirements for a REFEDS Level 1 Assurance Profile.

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REF14-3: Standards and specifications

REFEDS is taking more of a significant role as a body that works on standards and specifications for the community. It has been agreed that where appropriate, this work should be developed as much as possible via IETF RFC mechanisms. The aim for 2014 is to embed the work that REFEDS has begun in this area and begin to build up from the basework. In 2014, this will include further work on the Metadata Query Protocol work, which is essential for the development of metadata aggregation and management, a review of existing attribute schema considering requirements in this area, and Entity Category development.

Due to the significant nature of this work, external consultants will be hired to provide the focus needed for development and implementation.

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REF14-4: Services

Workarea 4 will focus on the services that have been developed as part of REFEDS and continue to support their operation and usability. In 2014, this will include development work for the PEER software to improve the functionality of SAMLmetaJS as a core component of the usability of PEER / REEP. A key signing ceremony will be held to enable REEP to enter full operational mode, and federations will be encouraged to experiment with REEP metadata.

Further requirements for MET will be gathered based on usage by federations but no further enhancements are planned for this work period unless requested by the community.

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REF14-5: Specialist Work Areas

REFEDS provides the opportunity for new ideas and innovations that do not yet have defined outputs to be incubated for specialist work areas. It also supports infrastructure to allow closed discussion groups for more sensitive conversations relating to federation operations.

Any participant in the REFEDS community can propose a specialist work area. The REFEDS Coordinators will provide wiki space, mailing lists and other infrastructure to allow the groups to operate, but it will be the responsibility of each group to foster discussion and develop ideas.


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