Minutes
Attending: Janemarie Duh, Mark Scheible, Eric Goodman, Mike Grady, Keith Wessel, Tom Barton, Kim Milford, Steve Carmody, Jim Jokl
With: Ian Young, Dean Woodbeck, Dave Shafer, Shannon Roddy, IJ Kim
Action Items
(AI) Dean to incorporate suggested changes to the Nov. 9 minutes prior to publication.
Approval of minutes from Nov. 9, 2017
These are approved contingent on Dean incorporating suggested changes prior to publication.
Ops Update
The latest enhancement of the Federation Manager includes the ability to self-manage SIRTFI. The next iteration will include certificate support in the Federation Manager (targeting about eight weeks for the next release)
Working Group Updates
SP Streamlining - Janemarie touched base with the co-chairs. The group is working on a couple of documents: 1) primer document and 2) criteria document. Janemarie suggested they ping the participants list for feedback when ready. They are chartered through the end of December, but that will be revised as the group will not be finished by then.
Deployment Profiles - Should be finished with tweaks to saml2int soon, then will have an InCommon profile to layer over that. Should all be wrapped up prior to Global Summit
Attributes for Collaboration - Tom B is gathering data about the InCommon participants that have faculty/researchers participating in collaboration reachable by federation. The WG will also be researching why so many campuses don’t operate IdPs in a way to support such collaborations.
OIDC - Working to identify groups that have OIDC in production and invite them to attend calls to discuss their experience.
In general, TAC should provide some guidance to working groups on deadlines for white papers or whatever their final product will be. This could be part of the 2018 work plan discussion over the next month or two.
Baseline Expectations for Trust in Federation
There was a discussion about the upcoming requirement for having a privacy policy URL in metadata. Steven plans to publish a web page that will list those who already publish such URLs. TomB provided a link to the Baseline roadmap for additional details about this and other metadata elements. The new successor to the Assurance Advisory Committee (the Community Trust and Advisory Board) will soon begin the process of developing a community consensus process to resolve some of the questions around this.
There was also a discussion about the logo URL requirement, one recent thread on the "technical-discuss" list. This and other questions may be a good use of the community consensus process. The deployment profiles WG plans to add logo MDUI information to saml2int, so coordination with that will be key.
Updates on TAC Voting
Steering received and approved the list of TAC nominees to begin in 2018. There was a question about whether people who are also contractors with Internet2 need to sign a conflict of interest agreement. Ann is following up with Internet2 legal on that question. New TAC members with terms January 1, 2018 - December 31, 2020:
Heather Flanagan - Spherical Cow Consulting
Judith Bush - OCLC
Eric Kool-Brown - University of Washington
Matt Brookover - Colorado School of Mines
Tom Demeranville - ORCID - based in the UK and involved with AARC and SURFconnext, as well as other European IdPs
Chair and Vice Chair
Mark Scheible was elected chair for 2018 and the Vice Chair ballot is now open. Eric suggested that for next year, it might be useful to have some sort of statement of interest from candidates to differentiate between “willing” and “interested.”
Reflections on TAC
Mark shared a “reflections on TAC” document. Quoting Tom Barton: “It may be a good moment in which to step back, take stock, and think about where TAC should go over the next year or so.”
The last TAC roadmap is two years old (Oct. 7, 2015 minutes). It may be time to develop a new TAC roadmap that also states the responsibilities of TAC, given the number of governance and advisory groups in existence now (CACTI, Trust/Identity PAG, Steering, AAC/CTAB). The existing work plan document may be helpful.
As InCommon has evolved and matured, and added staff, TAC has turned from being hands-on operational to taking a higher-level view. TAC needs to develop a picture of what the issues are going to be over the next N years and do some work to explore addressing those issues. Providing this reflective aspect is important - the environment, the pressures, the change, how to evolve. It may be useful to have a joint call with Steering and InCommon leadership to discuss strategy and direction.
It would also be helpful to develop an InCommon elevator speech, although it may more likely be several elevator speeches. Kevin also mentioned the need for a strategic planning process with the community.