InCommon Steering Committee Minutes - April 24, 2013

Attending: Jack Suess, Klara Jelinkova, Kevin Morooney, Chris Holmes, Michael Gettes, Ardoth Hassler, John O'Keefe
With: John Krienke, Ann West, Shel Waggener, Renee Shuey, Tom Barton, Emily Eisbruch (scribe)

2013 Officers

Officers for 2013 were approved:
Chair - Jack Suess
Vice Chair – Klara Jelinkova
Treasurer - Mark Crase
Secretary - Joel Cooper
Assistant Secretary - Michael Gettes

It was also agreed that, to increase transparency, minutes of future InCommon Steering meetings will be published (upon approval by the InCommon Steering secretary) in a publicly available web or wiki space.

Assurance Advisory Committee

Steering approved the AAC request that Steve Devoti of University of Wisconsin-Madison be appointed as vice chair of the AAC.

H4. Carrie Regenstein Scholarship

(AI) Ardoth Hassler will share document that describes the criteria and application process for the scholarship created last year to honor Carrie Regenstein, the first chair of InCommon Steering. Internet2 has committed to funding for five years. Plans are to have the first recipient receive the scholarship to attend the 2013 Identity Week in November. Scholarship information and the commitment letter from Dave Lambert should be added to the wiki. The selection committee should include at least one Steering member and may include Carrie.

Identity Landscape Update from TAC

Tom Barton and Renee Shuey reported on the work of the InCommon TAC subgroup charged with identifying the projects that comprise the higher education identity landscape. This is a preliminary report, as the subgroup has not completed its work.

First phase:

  • Identified 55 identity projects and sent short surveys to each
  • Received completed surveys from 21 projects
  • David Walker conducted a conference call with a number of identity thought leaders (a summary is on the wiki)
  • Drafting a report based on the surveys and conference call

Preliminary Observations

  • Rich set of interrelated activities
  • All activities are addressing important aspects of IdM in HE
  • Leaders have good awareness of and connect with related activities

Common challenges for the various projects

  • Governance, funding, sustainability
  • Differing models can hamper inter-project collaboration.

Governance models include:

  • Open source meritocracy (developers/leads determine roadmap with varying degrees of community input
  • Managing partners (roadmap set by investing parters)
  • Governing umbrella organization (IDESG, InCommon Cert Service, eduroam-us)

Funding/sustainability models include:

  • Volunteers (sufficient value to individuals or their employers to contribute time)
  • Participation fees (in governing organizations)
  • User fees
  • Sponsored

Gaps and challenges identified thus far:

  • Campus/adopter maturity
  • Vendor compliance with standards
  • Expertise to build good user experience
  • Finding sufficient expertise generally
  • Misalignment of governance and funding
  • BYO(I,C)
  • Extending federation’s reach
  • Assurance, audit, attestation

The identity landscape subgroup also identified questions for InCommon to consider, in light of this work:

  • InCommon’s community needs it to become more accountable, mature. John Krienke noted that this is an ongoing process and that InCommon has made major strides towards resilience in operations. (AI) Michael Gettes will lead a subgroup to identify ways to improve accountability and maturity of practices (John O’Keefe and Kevin Morooney will also serve; Mark Crase will be invited)
  • How should InCommon’s model of community engagement change?

It is important to engage the community more than once per year. There is also a need to do more outreach to the CIOs. We should consider running events in conjunction with EDUCAUSE meetings (Ann and Rodney have discussed).

Jack reported that the CIOs attending the April 24 session on Trusted Identity in Education requested an identity roadmap. There is a need for material/graphics to describe to CIOs how the identity pieces fit together. (AI) Jack and Klara will work on this.

  • How should InCommon’s mission relate to that or other organizations, in US and elsewhere?

Given our limited resources, should we become more involved with NSTIC and IDESG? Are there other resources to bring to bear in this area?

  • How can InCommon increase adoption of federation?

Should InCommon include all members of the higher education community? John O’Keefe noted, for example, that less than half of the CLAC schools are currently InCommon participants.

There was also a discussion about engagement with CIFER and the need for InCommon to provide more direct input to the CIFER governance group. Perhaps we could leverage the support agreement between Internet2 and CIFER.

There were questions about whether the TAC's Identity Landscape subgroup will explore the pros and cons of governance models as well.

Expanded Role for Steering

Shel Waggener joined the meeting to continue the discussion of an expanded role for Steering. The concept is that Steering would: 1) remain the governing body for the InCommon LLC, and 2) would be responsible for the oversight of Internet2 identity products, services, and research and development, as well as the relationships with other identity efforts outside of Internet2.

There was also discussion about Steering’s gap analysis regarding the InCommon LLC charter and bylaws.

(AI) In the next two weeks, Steering will develop an outline of questions to be answered in order to make the broader scope of responsibility happen.

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