InCommon Federation Discussions About Online Student Services

[Ann West <>]

Notes from InCommon Student: July 25
---------------------------------------------------
- Joanne Berg, Wisconsin
- Tom Black, Stanford
- Ken Klingenstein, Internet2
- Nancy Krogh, Idaho
- Mark McConahay, Indiana
- Ken Servis, USC
- Alan Walsh, Indiana
- Ann West, Internet2/EDUCAUSE

Action Items
-----------------
- All please check the July 18 notes and send Ann any corrections. They 
are located on the wiki, if you've misplaced the email versions.

- Joanne will be working with Ron Kramer to extend the governance 
article for C&U Journal. She will also discuss with the editor the 
possibility of developing a resources article as a follow up.

- Ann will contact Jeff about this second article as well.

Announcements
----------------------
We'll be moving this group to a bi-weekly call to keep the momentum 
going from the Workshop.
Stay tuned for announcement of next call: August 8.  We'll be talking 
about further prioritizing the items from this discussion and the wiki 
and determining next steps.

Notes
--------
Welcome new members
      Mark McConahay, Indiana          
      Alan Walsh, Indiana
      Jeff von Munkwitz-Smith, UConn/AACRAO

For those of you on last week's call, please check the July 18 notes and 
send Ann any corrections. They are located on the wiki, if you've 
misplaced the email versions.

AACRAO IdM Workshop

Ken K joined the call and discussed several points that came to him 
during the Workshop:

1) There was lots of energy and pain expressed at the Workshop, but it 
seemed like the technical technical and functional folks that were 
worrying about each others domains. There's a lot going on in IdM space 
on the technical/process side that we can assemble and make available to 
the community to relieve some of this angst. What's the right group to 
approach with this information and to work with on shared 
recommendations for the registrar/IT community? Is it AACRAO, PESC, NSC 
or some other group?  How do we make traction on IdM across the 
registrar community and coordinate our efforts?

The group emphatically identified AACRAO as the organization with the 
membership that guides the efforts of both PESC and NSC. It's through 
AACRAO that we all work together to help the registrar community.

2) If it's AACRAO then, who would develop IdM-related recommendations? 
Nancy mentioned the AACRAO Information Systems and Technology Committee, 
but thought that the IdM scope is too big (or too specific) for her 
group. Joanne mentioned that a task force should be assembled to work on 
shared IdM issues. It should have campus members from the registrar/IT 
areas and be a traveling forum to help both communities come together. 
Joanne then proposed that this InC-Student group be repurposed/charged 
with this task, since we have the right folks on it already. We would 
just need the blessing of AACRAO.

The group would use federated identity as a driver to inspire campuses 
to adopt standard practices. In this light, our primary tasks might be:
   a) review existing federal (higher education?) documents/practices 
and promulgate them in the AACRAO community and
   b) identify gaps that are of most concern that we should consider. 
One example that came up is developing strategies for  resolving 
duplicate identities; this topic is not germane to federating but is 
certainly sticky for campus operations.

----------
Ken K. then brought up a few issues:

- Enrollment verification and vendors interested in using/supplying this 
service. MyIdentit-e (https://www.myidentit-e.com/) is a enrollment 
verification service offered by Douglas Stewart Company and just joined 
the InCommon Federation. From the website, it looks like students send 
their information to this service, and it would in turn verify their 
status to vendors (using SAML/Shib?) and enable them to get "discounted 
products." Student Universe (http://www.studentuniverse.com) is an 
example of the type of discount service that is the target for MyIdentit-e.

However, we could release "studentness" to companies directly using a 
Shib attribute or two. Given that NSC does this now, what data are 
supplied to the Clearinghouse and what are the rules that govern 
release? Can we (should we?) map their release policies to the federated 
space? What  proves "student-ness" in this context? And does the 
eduPerson Schema have the right attributes? How many attributes does it 
take to point to identity? Nancy reported a recent conference where 
schools used 3-10 pieces of information, but the mean was 5.  We'd want 
to be cognizant about when we cross over from the point of verifying 
enrollment to supplying identity.

- Drivers for DoE/NSC and Campus Adoption - Is there a set of DoE/NSC 
apps that the registrars use that are problematic and that if we had 
supporting federated identity would help sway adoption?  Nancy mentioned 
that the NSC Degree verify service requires the institution to have one 
primary contact to update institutional degrees. However, in reality, 
there may be several folks who have this access for backup purposes. 
It's an important function, but problematic to get access taken away, so 
when someone leaves or takes a new position, their access is still 
active for a good period of time. Ken K mentioned that one way to 
address this would be to pass a role attribute to NSC for authorization 
purposes. But supplying staff roles could be a problem: we'd have to 1) 
normalize the staff roles for NSC and 2) help campuses make these 
available as attributes for exchanging with NSC. If someone has multiple 
roles, the institution could include all of them in a multi-value 
attribute and just pass the entire list to the vendor. The company would 
then select the one of interest and grant access (or not, if the right 
one is not in the list).

Tom mentioned that Stanford is working with NSC on getting student 
federated access up and running this fall and staff next spring. Is 
there anything we should be giving to NSC to educate them on common 
practices for service providers?

-------
So the group has a lot to talk about. The identified next steps include:

1) Joanne will be working with Ron Kramer to extend the governance 
article for C&U Journal. She will also discuss with the editor the 
possibility of developing a resources article as a follow up. Ann will 
contact Jeff about this second article as well.

2) We'll be moving this to a bi-weekly call to keep the momentum going 
from the Workshop.
Stay tuned for announcement of next call: August 8.  We'll be talking 
about further prioritizing the items from this call and the wiki and 
determining next steps.