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Over the last several months representatives of our campus have been participating in the discussions sponsored by the InCommon/MACE Social Identity Working Group. I think that this discussion has served an important role in understanding the roles that social identities can play in Higher Education. Recently, this group has developed a set of requirements for a centrally run gateway capable of mapping identities from social network providers (eg google, yahoo. facebook, etc) to SAML Assertions that could be consumed by the Shibboleth SP software. There are Research SPs on our campus that would find this to be a valuable way to broaden access to their sites. In addition, our campus is searching for ways to allow a variety of adjuncts in the community to gain short-term access to our LMS system; this gateway would allow that functionality without requiring that we issue Brown identities to all of these people.
We feel that prototyping and testing such a gateway is an important effort, and our campus is willing to participate in this effort through the incubator and service validation stages, for a period of six months. I feel that this testing will help to refine our understanding of needs and cost models. Operating this sort of gateway provides a great way for the community to learn as a group. We understand that there is some risk involved here, and that this may not become a full production service.
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