News and information about InCommon Academy offerings

[Dean Woodbeck <>]

InCommon and PESC are pleased to announce a new strategic partnership to promote shared standards across the Research and Education community. The agreement has been ratified by the InCommon Steering Committee and PESC’s Board of Directors.

Under the agreement, the organizations will work together on common priorities and align efforts to advance each other’s goals. The goal will be to promote the development and adoption of shared standards and infrastructure across the higher education community, its partners and stakeholders. This collaboration will focus on areas of strategic importance to both organizations and to the education community.

Both InCommon and PESC are champions of standards that support research, learning and administrative services. InCommon develops and promotes trust-related services based on community standards, while PESC develops and promotes data-interchange standards related to electronic document interchange, especially in the area of education records and student data.

“PESC’s mission of enabling efficient and secure student data exchange nicely complements InCommon’s trust focus for research and education. “ said Jack Suess, chair of the InCommon Steering Committee and CIO of University of Maryland-Baltimore County. “Our organizations intend to leverage our shared belief in the value and strength of community-driven standards and best practices.”

"One example of how this collaboration is bearing fruit is a joint project between PESC and InCommon to bring vendors, campus IT departments, registrars, and admissions & financial aid officers together to look at how we can use Federation and single sign-on to streamline the transition of students between high school and their college experience,” stated Charles Leonhardt, principal technologist, Georgetown University and chair of PESC’s Electronic Authentication/Authorization (EA2) Task Force.

The EA2 Task Force will be meeting in person at PESC’s upcoming Fall 2011 Data Summit being held October 12-14, 2011, in San Francisco. Leaders of the new project, AdmitMe, will also host an open discussion for registrants including how to participate going forward. Registration and hotel information for the Fall 2011 Data Summit is posted at www.PESC.org.

About InCommon

InCommon, operated by Internet2, serves the U.S. education and research communities, supporting a common framework of trust services, including the InCommon Federation and the community-driven InCommon Certificate Service. The InCommon Federation, the U.S. trust federation for research and education, enables scalable, trusted collaborations among its community of participants. Identity Providers give their users single sign-on convenience and privacy protection, while Service Providers control access to their protected resources. The Certificate Service offers unlimited certificates to the U.S. higher education community for one fixed annual fee. For more information, see www.incommon.org.

About PESC

Established in 1997 at the National Center for Higher Education and located in Washington, D.C., PESC is a non-profit, community-based, 501 (c)(3) umbrella association of colleges and universities; college and university systems; professional and commercial organizations; data, software and service providers; non-profit organizations and associations; and state and federal government agencies. Through open and transparent community participation, PESC enables cost-effective connectivity between data systems to accelerate performance and service, to simplify data access and research, and to improve data quality along the education lifecycle.

PESC envisions national and international interoperability, that is a trustworthy, inter-connected environment built by and between communities of interest in which data flows seamlessly from one system to another and throughout the entire eco-system when and where needed without compatibility barriers but in a safe, secure, reliable, and efficient manner. To achieve the mission and the vision, PESC organizes activities to: accelerate performance and service, reduce cost, lead collaborative development, set and maintain common data standards, promote best practices, link public and private sectors, and serve as data experts.

While PESC promotes the implementation and usage of data exchange standards, PESC does not set (create or establish) policies related to privacy and security. Organizations and entities using PESC standards and services should ensure they comply with FERPA and all local, state, federal and international rules on privacy and security as applicable. For more information, see www.PESC.org.