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REFEDS Steering Committee Agenda, 21st October 2015

Attendees

Valter, Heith, Thomas, Jean-Fracois, Tom, Licia, Nicole.

Agenda Items

1. Open Actions.

ACTION20150715-1: Add discussion on MARI issues to the agenda for REFEDS@I2 and work with I2 Federation Interoperability WG on this issue with the aim to present.
STATUS: CLOSED see workplan review
ACTION20150715-4: LF to use AARC gather experience from international SPs when joining a federation.
STATUS: Ongoing, AARC only started in May.
ACTION20150715-7: NH to give more feedback on the REFEDS role in FedLab futures after follow up calls with Roland and Rainer.
STATUS: A better plan is now availble on the work to be done. Because different funding streams will be used (one of which being REFEDS), it is important to agree exactly which work happens where whilst at the same time to ensure that everything works together.

2. Workplan Review / Feedback from I2 meeting.

The discussion covered only work items not started, rather than the whole plan.

REF15-3D: this (assigned to LF) was about having some conference call to discuss namespace requirements to describe attributes coming from different VO. Nothing has been done, partially because the revision of SCHAC took care of some of the problems.

ACTION: LF to contact the people who requested REF15-3D this work to investigate whether the work should be pushed to next year.

REF15-6B: MARI WG, not a lot has happened to kick start this work. Tom noted that it’s an hard problem, so maybe better to channel energies in other areas.
ACTION: LF to inform Ken (who was the main promoter of the group) that the SC decided to close this WG down. The SC believe this work will be repropsed in the near future.

REF15-6C- OpenID Connect WG. Not a lot has been done in this WG. NH noted that there is a group in KANTARA on related topics,

ACTION: LF to contact Roland to check a) if there is a scope to repropose this WG in next year workplan, b) to provide an high level description of the scope and the output and c) ask about the implication of the Kantara WG.

3. Update on VAT changes.

LF presented the changes to the VAT rules applied to REFEDS and similar project. After a revision of the whole former TERENA's activities, the Dutch Authorithies declared that REFEDS should be subjected to VAT. This makes all GÈANT manpower 21% more expensive starting from 2016.

The SC anonymously agreed there is no other place to really do the same type of work as REFEDS does currently, so it is not worth to look for convoluted solutions only for the VAT. The SC also felt that the part of the success of REFEDS is due to the fact that REFEDS is felt to be an independent entity, not subject to the control of any specific group.

The SC reccomends GÈANT to explore options to return to the old situation. Should this not be possible, the SC asked more details on the followiing:

1. how much time NH and LF spend on REFEDS?

2. how much reserves has REFEDS for 2016?

3. could we get more federations joining?

4. could we look at additional revenues: charging for meeting attendance for non-members, getting commercial sponsors, others.

5. Consultations:

Academia.

This has been a very difficult consultation which started as an entity category. At the I2 Tech Exch Leif presented his proposal and a new consultation has to start again.

ACTION: The SC AGREED not to ahead with the EC approach and to start a new process as trust tag.

Sirtfi

The initial sirtfi document is now completed.

ACTION: The SC AGREED to go ahead with the consultation

NH proposed to use a consultation mailing list to move some of the noise on other list to confuse some potential adopters.

ACTION: The SC AGREED to use a dedicate mailing list for the consultation process.

6. Promotional Materials.

NH has been working on some promotional materials for REFEDS to support campaigns for IdPs and SPs within federations. Feedback would be appreciated.

The SC found the leaflet very good. Two comments:

replace CoCo with attribute release and EU laws (or similar, the name CoCo may not be known to everybody)
add a bullet on REFEDS funding

7. AOB.

VN reported that the CoCo was presented to Article 29 Working party 29 in Sep. Changes to the CoCo will be required happen to get the bless of Article 29 Working party . This makes it impossible to have a consultation on the CoCo.

ACTION: LF to add this for the DEC call

8. Action Summary.

ACTION-20151021-01: LF to contact the people who requested REF15-3D this work to investigate whether the work should be pushed to next year.

ACTION-20151021-02: LF to inform Ken (who was the main promoter of the group) that the SC decided to close this WG down.

ACTION-20151021-03: LF to contact Roland to check a) if there is a scope to repropose this WG in next year workplan, b) to provide an high level description of the scope and the output and c) ask about the implication of the Kantara WG.

ACTION:-20151021-04 The SC AGREED not to ahead with the EC approach and to start a new process as trust tag

ACTION:-20151021-05 The SC AGREED to go ahead with the consultation

ACTION-20151021-06: The SC AGREED to use a dedicate mailing list for the consultation process.

ACTION-20151021-07-: LF to add this for the DEC call