COmanage-Dev Call 6-Feb-09
*Attending*
Heather Flanagan, Stanford (chair)
Jim Leous, Penn State
Chris Hubing, Penn State
Digant Kasundra, Stanford
Steven Carmody, Brown
Ken Klingenstein, Internet2
Michael Gettes, MIT
Tom Barton, U. of Chicago
RL "Bob" Morgan, U. Washington
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Emily Eisbruch (scribe)
*New Action Items*
[AI] Heather and Digant will send roadmap information for slides to Ken by Tuesday, Feb. 10.
[AI] (Ken) will ask his contact at the Norwegian Federation about Foodle.
[AI] (Bob) will provide to the list background on user stories.
*Carry Over Action Items*
[AI] (Ken) will talk with Lois about Fluid involvement in improving the COmanage GUI, scheduling it for later in the year.
[AI] (Heather) will develop a COmanage roadmap and place it on the wiki.
[AI] (SteveO) and (Digant) will work on setting up a subversion repository at Internet2.
[AI] (Chris) will contact Atlassian and try to obtain a timetable for Jira domestication. (Ken) will provide some wording for this communication with Atlassian.
[AI] (Bob) will send links to the group on the invitation problem.
[AI] (Ken) will send a note to his contact at OOI to explore their level interest (after the COmanage alpha is ready).
[AI] (Ken) will ping Frank Siebenlist from Argonne National Laboratory, who is interested in COmanage.
[AI] (Digant) will create COmanage video #2, when the improved Collabmin GUI is available.
Status Update on Alpha Release
Digant is debugging the building of new appliances.
Next week Digant plans to start building another appliance and to work on moving things into the new Debian repositiory, as well as testing Confluence and Sympa.
The Alpha release will support the use case of rolling out an appliance using an existing external federation. There are bugs in the installer process and the setup wizard that need to be addressed, so it makes sense to focus on supporting one use case.
StevenC commented that the COmanage instance isn't required to join a federation; it just has to federate with an IdP. It would be feasible to federate with Protect Network or test Shib.
The Confluence implementation was about half done by Scotty. Digant will need help with Confluence implementation. Chris knows Confluence well and can assist.
The plan is for the Alpha release to include:
-Sympa
-Confluence
-Drupal
Target date for the Alpha release is Friday, Feb 6 or Feb 13.
Plans for Beta Release
The plan is to include Jira in the Beta release, not the upcoming Alpha release. There is no firm date for Atlassian to domesticate Jira, so hooks in COmanage will be required. Ken noted that Jira is important to much of the COmanage target community.
Ken also stated that fuller domestication of Sympa should also be in the COmanage Beta. Bob will talk with the Sympa people and the hope is that they will be amenable to doing that further domestication.
Demo Version
Penn State has made preparations to put a demo COmanage version up on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This will be done when a stable COmanage version is made available.
Internet2 Spring Member Meeting
Heather suggested that it would be nice to have two COmanage sessions at Internet2 SMM:
1. A broad conversation on domestication and collaboration, how people are solving these problems, and what the problems are to solve.
2. A BoF to demo COmanage.
Ken stated that by Spring Member Meeting there will be a broader COmanage development group. He suggested that on the next call we should talk about how we as a community transition to this. At CAMP in Tempe some new parties agreed to participate.
Ken's Report
Ken discussed COmanage with Ed Seidel.
Bob and Ken discussed COmanage with Alan Walsh of Indiana University. Indiania University joined the nanoHUB community and plans to federate and COmanage it. They are eager to get the COmanage code.
Ken asked for feedback on his slides for a Feb 11 presentation to the North Carolina Federation. Ken plans a new slide on caveats and thought about including the invite problem on that slide. Michael and TomB suggested that the invite problem is more of a growth dimension than a caveat.
Heather and Digant will help with a chronology or roadmap slide.
[AI] Heather and Digant will send roadmap information for slides to Ken by Tuesday, Feb. 10.
[AI] (Ken) will ask his contact at the Norwegian Federation about Foodle
Scope
Michael stated that from a Sympa email, it sounds like we're going too far in domesticating Sympa. We should not be focusing on hiding system administration, but just on delivering applications in a unified, federated infrastructure.
TomB noted that for Grouper and Signet, a point of abstraction was needed, and the subject interface provided that. We can't wait for all apps to develop a common interface that COmanage can latch onto. So while we push vendors to provide domesticated apps, we must also provide an adapter that's as simple as possible that adapts to a wide range of things. Jira would be the first application having this middle piece.
Michael: Technical, programmatic interfaces are OK.
But putting a new interface on Sympa is going too far.
Bob: The goal is that adding someone to a group in Grouper will get them on a list in Sympa.
Bob noted that the user story concept is being used by his group. It would be helpful to have user stories for COmanage.
[AI] (Bob) will provide to the list background on user stories.
Next Call: Friday, 20-Feb-09 at 2:00pm ET.