REFEDS Steering Committee Agenda, 15th July 2015
Attendees
The meeting will take place at 13:00 CEST on 15th July 2015 via Skype.
In attendance: Tom Barton, Licia Florio, Jean Francois Guezou, Nicole Harris, Thomas Lenggenhager.
Apologies: Heath Marks (technical problems), Miro Milinovic, Valter Nordh
Agenda Items
1. Open Actions
SCM20150219-07: NH to push the MRPS back out to the REFEDS list with the summary responses so far and point out that we need more. NH to also push to edugain list.
Update: main issue lack of responce.
Superseded by events, it's now moved into eduGAIN and GN4.
The eduGAIN SC will be engaged. Edugain recommends each federations to have an MRPS but doesn't say what.
SCM20150219-11: NH and KJK to work on reviving the MARI conversation.
Update: Action came out last year. WG was created but no action at all. There are relevant topics that are being discussed at the moment, due to the increased usage of eduGAIN. Still interop issues among between SAML1 and SAML2 attributes released.
Decision on what to do with this: two options (i) put more energy to revitalise this group or (ii) push it back to eduGAIN.
Tom noted there is a WG federation interoperability WG under I2. The driving energy has to come from the federations that see this as a problem.
ACTION: move it to the refeds meeting for I2 and Vienna if needed.
ACTION: add a reference on mari page that the group is hold.
2. Workplan review
REF-1 SURVEY - All results are up online.
REF-2 - 2 entity categories are done. NH doing work with Mikael Linden on CoCo.
More difficult is the Academia Entity Category. Nicole has tried to summarise the use-cases (InAcademia, CLARIN and Elixir) on the wiki. We have a possible category and we could push out a consultation.
Q: Should we go ahead and push it?
Tom: Looking at a pilot wihin InCommon K-12 which would bring many more entities to eduGAIN. How would Academia work in this case for the IdPs? Pushing out the discussion may be a good thing
ACTION: Agreed to push it out to formal consulation
REF-3: Work ongoing on VO and groups
REF-4: Services
Met is now using the pyff framework (used by Leif). A call for new features request will go out soon. Also looking at the big picture on more general monitoring tools.
ACTION: NH to put out a call for new features for MET.
PEER/REEP - Developemt progressing well. At some point we need to look at the business model as to whether to push this a service. Some ideas are to use PEER/REEP to help connect metadata directly to eduGAIN.
ACTION: LF to use AARC gather experience from international SPs when joining a federation.
3. Follow up from TNC meeting re: Chris's presentation.
Products and implementation is one issue, creating interop consideration. Second is the nature of what federations consist of - things have started to emerge, that gives an idea of what might be happening here. This begins to raise issues and questions about expectations of what we do and what we should do around this space.
4. Academia Entity Category.
NH outlined the process for the Academia Entity Category to date, the two sides of the argument for the category and the political drivers behind this. TB highlighted that it would be good to draw out the IdP arguments for implementing this - as the constituency of federations change Higher Education and related institutions may wish to explicitly distinguish themselves from other IdP types.
NH asked for APPROVAL to begin a 4 week consultation period on this category (possibly extended to 6 weeks due to the holiday period). Members approved this proposal.
ACTION: NH to update with wiki pages with reflections on IdP requirements for the Academia Entity Category and then start the consultation period.
5. FedLab proposals (shared via email).
FedLab - A new proposal to request addtional funding from the Vietsch foundation and some budget from REFEDS. Members are invited to consider the proposals for REFEDS, the larger picture of how FedLab should be structured (particularly conversations around central vs distributed models) and sustainability questions for FedLab.
ACTION: All read the circulated document on FedLab.
ACTION: NH to give more feedback on the REFEDS role in FedLab futures after follow up calls with Roland and Rainer.
6. Brief sponsorship update.
Sponsorship change process has gone and well and was easy to implement for sponsors. We may be able to add a new platinum sponsor in the 2015 period.
7. AOB.
No AOB points raised.