InCommon Federation Discussions About Online Student Services

[Ann West <>]

Please send along corrections and omissions, and I'll update the notes before I put them on the wiki.

Best,
Ann


InC-Student: Notes from 9/5/2008
--------------------------------------------
Andrea Beesing, Cornell
Brendan Bellina, USC
Tom Black, Stanford
Karen Hanson, Wisconsin
Ken Klingenstein, Internet2
Mark McConahay, Indiana
RL Bob Morgan, Washington
Ken Servis, USC
Renee Shuey, Penn State
Alan Walsh, Indiana
Ann West, Internet/EDUCAUSE (scribe)

Action Items
----------------
- All to contact others on the call if you are interested in working with them on the vendor relationships outlined below.

- All to contact Ann ASAP if you'd like to participate on the program committee and join the weekly
calls.

- Renee and Mark to suggest someone from their institutions to compliment the IT/registrar pairs 
already serving on the program committee from PSU and Indiana. 

- Tom to introduce Ann via email to Hunt.

- Ken to develop a use case to demonstrate the type of action we'd like to discuss with DoEd for the 
next call.

Next Call
------------
Next call is Friday September 19 at 3:00 pm Eastern.

Notes
-------

1) Review Notes - Notes from the last meeting (8/8/08) were approved. 

2) Review previous action items

   - Joanne will contact Karen Partlow and Galen Rafferty at the CIC 
   office to pursue a course-share session at the upcoming CIC meeting.
	+  Galen Rafferty from the CIC will try to join Amber Marks at the 
	CIC meeting in Madison (October 19-21). See Joanne's from of 8/13.
	
   - Ann will contact AACRAO regarding the scope of the Tempe CAMP and 
   the potential involvement of PESC.
	+ The CAMP meeting should address the life cycle of the student and
	include admissions staff to help complete this picture. See complete
	discussion below under the CAMP agenda item. In addition, we'd like 
	PESC to participate at the meeting, but felt that the AACRAO, registrar,
	and admissions staff on the program committee would be best to direct 
	how this is done. 

3) Announcements and status reports

- Vendor relationships  

PennState - Renee mentioned that Karen S. had received inquiries from campus about
	Smarthinking.com, an online tutoring and writing services site. 
	DigitalMeasures - PSU has a contract with Digital Measures 
	(www.digitalmeasures.com) requiring that they will join InCommon; 
	corporate adoption of this is going slowly. Andrea from Cornell had asked 
	the company about using Shibboleth and was told that they needed a 
	Java version of the Service Provider software.  

Indiana - Interfase, a hosted career planning service is being purchased by the 
	Bloomington campus. Alan also said that Indiana is sponsoring the IT 
	research company, Burton Group, to join InCommon. 25% of their clientèle 
	are from higher education.

Cornell - A group of Cornell students and alumni have started a company called Video
	Notes. They video tape lectures and provide access to their video repository
	using federated identity. The software includes metadata so you can search 
	a lecture for a particular topic/clip. Another app, called DropBox 
	(http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2293560,00.asp), enables users 
	to share files in a secure way. They are considering Shibboleth and 
	federated access. 

Stanford - NSC is joining InCommon and should be a formal member very soon, given 
	that the paperwork is finished and the mechanics of becoming a member are 
	being worked on. NSC is also working on altering their student application 
	to accept the institutional id instead of SSN. Schools interested in 
	pursuing fed access would have to support NSC's expanded extract, which
	includes institutional id. The target test date for the new service
	is October, and there's an NSC advisory meeting that month so we will 
	know more then.

USC - USC has a number of applications using Shibboleth, but many of them are 
	bilateral relationships and don't use InCommon Federation. Interfase, 
	Google Apps, YouTube, Aries (library), and Digital Measures 
	are examples of this. USC is interested in federating with the Burton Group 
	and possibly Microsoft DreamSpark

UWash - Student Universe.Com, a company that sells discount airline tickets to 
	students, should be available soon to UWash students. The company is a 
	member of InCommon, and UWash is working getting agreement on
	privacy and presentation/pr. UWash is also working with Microsoft to 
	streamline the access to the second release of DreamSpark, their development 
	suite program for enrolled students. Bob also asked if anyone was interested
	in working together to approach the University Health System Consortium, an 
	alliance of 102 academic medical centers and 184 of their affiliated 
	hospitals representing approximately 90% of the nation’s non-profit academic
	medical centers. UHC offers its members specific programs and
	services to improve clinical, operational and patient safety performance. 
	Contact Bob if this is intriguing.

DoE - Ken K. asked if anyone had heard anything from the Dept. of Ed regarding 
	federated identity. No one on the call had.  

- EDUCAUSE Annual Meeting 
	Ken S., David Y., and Tom B. will be presenting on Friday morning at the
	EDUCAUSE Annual meeting. Ann asked if there was interest in doing a 
	discussion at the Registrar CG like last year. Ken S. will be soliciting 
	for agenda topics soon, so we will wait to see what he receives and then 
	how we might integrate Fed IdM topics. At minimum, Ann will be available to 
	talk about the upcoming CAMP. 

- PESC - No update 

4) CAMP

The CAMP Program Committee has been assembled, and the first call is this week. 
There's a great deal of overlap of the CAMP program committee and the InC Student 
roster. However, Ann proposed that the InC-Student group also have a standing agenda 
item to review the CAMP work when appropriate and make suggestions.  [AI] If you'd 
like to participate on the program committee and join the weekly calls, please contact 
Ann soon. 

Per the action item from the last call, the group discussed including admissions 
staff as a primary audience for the CAMP. Mark mentioned that the admissions function 
would be useful to include to help complete the student life cycle. The group agreed. 
The next task was to identify a program committee member.
[AI] Renee and Mark will suggest someone from their institutions to compliment the 
IT/registrar pairs already serving on the program committee from PSU and Indiana. 
Tom also suggested Louis Hunt, Vice Provost of Enrollment Management and Services 
at North Carolina State. He oversees both functions and has a good grasp of the 
technical issues. [AI] Tom will introduce Ann via email to Hunt.

Karen H. suggested that we consider including HR as well, since many students are 
also employees, and there are issues with integration between Student and HR functions. 
The group agreed that is indeed a big problem, but were concerned about including HR 
on the program committee, since the CAMP scope would be greatly increased. However, it 
might be good to invite key people from HR professional organizations (like CUPA) or 
institutional HR offices that work with student employees.


5)  Deliverables/Projects for 2009

In reviewing the notes from the August 8 and July 25, the group explored expanding 
its scope and role. Currently, much of our work is focused on federated-identity 
outreach, delivering presentations, leading discussions, and participating in 
workshops and so on. From the notes of these two meetings, the group discussed:

- expanding our scope to include campus IdM practices
- developing recommendations for the AACRAO community on IdM and Fed IdM practices.

Ken K. suggested focusing on working with the Depart of Ed and developing 
FERPA-compliant attribute release recommendations. For instance, are there 
certain attributes that could be released without requiring policy review each 
time it's used for a new purpose? 

The group suggested contacting Leroy Rooker, the Head of the Family 
Compliance Office at the DoEd and request that he assign someone from his 
office to work with us. (Rooker oversees FERPA and it's interpretation.)  But 
is it too early to involve the DoEd? Will it introduce some education/complexity 
that would slow us down? There was general agreement that a document developed with 
the FERPA stamp of approval would provide a high degree of legitimacy in the 
registrar community.

Our proposal to Rooker, though, would need some thought before we contact him. 
For instance, typical inquiries entail having his office recommend action on a 
particular use case. In our instance, we'd be looking for an ongoing dialog.  
[AI] For the next call, Ken will develop a use case to demonstrate the type of 
action we'd like to discuss. We may use this as a way to open a conversation with 
Rooker. 

Taking the conversation full circle, we then returned to the opening discussion 
about topic scope for the group. Mark suggested that we continue the discussion of 
possibly including IdM practices in our scope. We may decide, for instance, to 
participate/work on a certain number of IdM (in addition to federated IdM) items 
in a year. In the coming months, CAMP might fit into this goal, for instance. 

Next Call: Friday September 19 at 3:00 pm Eastern.