Minutes

Attendees: Bjön Mattson; Keith Wessel; Matthew Economou; Andy Morgan; Kathy Wright; Derek Eiler; Jeffrey Crawford; Jim VanLandeghem; Joanne Boomer; Grady Bailey; Mark Rank; Mariana Krenz

Reps from other Groups: Les LaCroix (CACTI),, David Bantz (CTAB)

Regrets: Kevin Morooney

Staff / SME:  Nicole Roy, Dave Shafer, IJ Kim, Steve Zoppi, Ann West, Eric Goodman, Albert Wu, David Walker

Scribes: Steven P, Mark R.

Minutes

  • Intellectual Property Reminder
  • Public Content Notice
  • Agenda Bash + request for notable working and advisory group updates
    • How many attending Community Exchange – only a few.
    • Les will be rolling off as CACTI liaison
    • Judith Bush and John Bradley will split time as CACTI liaison (browser updates will be coordinated so Judith can attend)
    • Updates
  • T&I / Operations
    • Federation Manager release yesterday.
    • Working through (good progress) on eduroam org deduplication.
  • Futures2 report 
    • is done pending final edits
    • Will be shared with advisory groups soon 
    • Will be shared more broadly at community exchange 
    • Albert will invite Kevin to TAC to present
  • CTAB
    • Met with Kevin re: Futures2 report
  • CACTI (Les Reports)
    • Last meeting went through the final report on the verifiable credentials working group. Will be sending formal consultation out shortly
    • Presentation with SME (Mark didn’t catch the name) and Nicole provided summary on how learner credentials and wallets are being used
    • Some discussion on Futures 2 report
  • Will try and get back into the habit of sending updates out in advance of the call.
  • Reminder: review REFEDS work plan and sign up if interested.
  • Still looking for committee (CTAB and CACTI) liaison volunteers (Keith)
    • Steve will not have bandwidth
    • Not a lot of work 
      • CTAB on similar schedule - Tuesdays at same time as TAC – Kathy Wright has volunteered
      • CACTI is on 4wk 2hr - next is Feb 28 at 1:30p ET (Wed Afternoon)
      • Keith will start arm twisting via email after this
  • Review * Access Entity Categories Guidance + next steps (Albert + Joanne)
    • (draft) Deployment Guidance for * Access Entity Categories
      • Albert gave a brief levelset / update
      • Intent is this is default guidance
      • There are some incomplete areas that still need guidance (for example subject identifier)
      • Is there a plan to discuss how this differs from current practice? Probably as needed . No plan to roll into BE at this time
      • A lot depends on practical adoption
      • SWAMID is currently dealing with some of these challenges.
      • REFEDS is developing tooling to check / verify 
    • ASK: do you agree with the general directions of this material
      • No objections.
    • ASK: do you agree that this material should move forward to formal community consultation
      • Comments would be reviewed by the (reconstituted) working group that originally developed the document.
  • Finalize 2024 TAC Work Plan (Keith) 
    • 2024 Q1-Q2 TAC Work Plan
    • Actionable items for the 1st half
      • * Access Entity Category efforts (subject-id)
      • Federation Proxy efforts
      • Federation Testing ( when do we start?)
        • Matthew report out
        • Need to develop a roadmap
        • Urgent items
          • Test IdPs - need to validate SP federation interoperability (behavioral validation)
        • strategic items
          • This is probably where the TAC can help most – not most urgent and defer until 2nd half of year.
        • Fed agencies may be a driver – still need requirements if it comes to be
        • There may be something to share with the TAC 
        • Ann will share an email describing a conversation with Matthew about testing service for federal agencies: 
          • The TAC has had a work item to develop federation testing for a couple of years. Progress has been very difficult to date. In Matthew’s words:  

The problem, as I see it, is that it's really hard for IdP or SP operators who wish to interoperate with the global R&E community to know when they got it right.  Current good federation practice involves an overwhelming variety of expectations, standards, entity categories, frameworks, profiles, and more.  There exists no single, comprehensive resource for operational guidance and integration testing.  What documentation or test resources exist are difficult to find even for experienced IAM professionals, are typically restricted to federation members, and are focused almost exclusively on IdPs.  And while the decentralized nature of R&E federation allows it to scale far beyond current commercial offerings, that same decentralization makes enacting meaningful change to IdP, SP, or federation operations seemingly impossible. 

          •  Thank you for the offer to chair/work on/develop prototype testing approach for TAC. As you know, we’re at the close of finishing up the Futures2 Report and will be publishing it to the community in Q1. That will likely drive changes for HOW we work together to develop value for the community.
          • In the short term, InCommon plans to develop a phase one, simple (?) testing service for REFEDS R&S, MFA, and Assurance Profiles that Research SPs (federal agencies in particular) can use to test their implementations. Like NIH’s testing service for IdPs, it doesn’t focus on all the integration options but rather tests the run-time policy support across the federation.  Using this approach also provides value to key SPs but doesn’t boil the testing ocean.
          • As a side note, we’ve asked Kyle Lewis/Tom Barton to update the NIST/REFEDS mapping as well. This is also key for federal agency engagement and fits well with the first round of the testing service as outlined above.
  • Futures2 input
    • (time expired)
  • Updates from the Quarterly Cross-committee Chair call (Keith)
    • (time expired)

International Updates

TIIME - TIIME conference meeting notes are now available: https://edu.nl/tiime


Next Meeting @ February 22, 2024



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