(in-person adjacent to TNC23)

Attendees

• Heather Flanagan 
• Nicole Harris 
• Albert Wu 
• Maarten Kremers 
• Alex Stuart 
• Pål Axelsson 
• John N/A 
• Thomas Baerecke  (remote)

Notes

• Thoughts on future REFEDS meetings and activities
  • REFEDS 47 - focus on tooling
  • Survey - keep going, shift to later, work in person at APAN in March
  • Sponsorship needs to happen more, and we need to look beyond federations for that. Some discussion re: possible software funding models, looking at Shib Consortium, other models. The problem being that REFEDS has not and arguably should not have an operational role.
    
    • Heather Flanagan to reach out to AAF Comms for ideas on how to develop a marketing program to attract new sponsors
      
• Discussion re SP federations and if/how to recognize them. They seem to be a proxy walled garden with significant complexity behind the wall. It’s also another way to expand our sponsorship targets.
• Planning for success - if REFEDS does attract new sponsors, what's the priority to use the funds?

  • MET (possibly already covered)

  • More regional meetings (APAN, RedCLARA, WACREN, UbuntuNet Alliance)

  • Distinguished Engineering scholarships

  • Participate in other styles of federation (e.g., ORCID, STM, …)

• Cross-promotion of more material
  • More social media marketing so we have a ready platform to actually do that cross-promotion
• We need to really focus on what we want REFEDS to be (this should be part of our next stage of planning)
  • Does REFEDS want to be a learning center? We currently provide the materials, but we do nothing to help people learn it.
  • Does REFEDS want to be a standards body? We de facto are, but we’re not particularly robust about it (not enough people, engagement, stakeholders actively engaged in representing their use cases)
  • Does REFEDS want to be an incubator? Consensus on “no”
    • The above is the next layer of detail to inform an operational or business plan to support our REFEDS Strategic Plan. We need those things before we seriously start shopping around for sponsors. “Give you money for what? What are you?”