InCommon Federation Discussions About Online Student Services

[Dean Woodbeck <>]

InC-Student: Notes from 1/23/2009
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Attending:

Brendan Bellina, University of Southern California
Renee Frost, Internet2
Karen Hanson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Keith Hazelton, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Nancy Krogh, University of Idaho
Mark McConahay, Indiana University
Angela Mennitto, Cornell University
RL Bob Morgan, University of Washington
Karen Schultz, Penn State University
Renee Shuey, Penn State University
Bruce Vincent, Stanford University
Ann West, Internet/EDUCAUSE
Dean Woodbeck, Internet2 (scribe)
 
Action Items
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Ann -- write a proposal for EDUCAUSE on the general topic of guidelines for student services and data release policies/challenges in a federated world.
 
Bob – update the Attribute Release draft on the wiki.
 
All – Send, to Nancy Krogh, ideas for topics that would be appropriate for AACRAO webinars.
 
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Update from Stanford/National Student Clearinghouse
 
NSC intends to go live at the end of January. Stanford and NSC have been going back and forth with respect to attributes, the use of targetedID and how that will fit in with PeopleSoft and Stanford’s unique identifier. One of the goals is to reduce the need to get at social security numbers and that any access is auditable and traceable.
 
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AACRAO Annual Meeting Sessions
 
Three sessions are scheduled for the April AACRAO annual meeting:
 
1. A half-day pre-meeting workshop will focus on identity management as a central part of a registrar’s toolkit. This will be a panel discussion geared to those new to the idea of IdM. The panel will include Mark McConahay, Tom Black, Ann West, Joanne Berg and Keith Hazelton.
 
2. Identity management implementation and lessons learned – Phil Tracey, manager of identity services at Northwestern.
 
3. Roundtable focused on the results of  last summer’s AACRAO IdM survey.
 
In addition, topics for the 2010 annual meeting will be due almost immediately after the 2009 meeting. Please give some thought to potential topics.
 
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Webinars
 
AACRAO is looking for topics that would be appropriate for webinars. There may be some good ideas coming out of CAMP. Please send any ideas/thoughts to Nancy Krogh. The topics of federated identity, Shibboleth and InCommon were mentioned as potentials. This will be added to the agenda for a call after CAMP.
 
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AACRAO Technology Conference
 
Mark is putting together the program for this year’s AACRAO Tech (July 19-21 in Tucson, AZ) and is soliciting session topics and entertaining the idea of a pre-conference workshop on IdM. Some ideas for a pre-conference include:
 

• Following-up on last year’s pre-conference, focus on solutions to IdM.
• Segment into different areas: 1) governance, 2) student life cycle, 3) access mgmt.
• Introduce the topic of IdM for those who didn’t attend last year (maybe including case studies), then intersperse other IdM topics in track sessions.
• Recruit a good IT/registrar pair or IT/student services pair to do an IdM intro and then also to do a track session.
• Discuss this at CAMP to see what people might like.

 
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EDUCAUSE
 
Proposals are due Feb. 14. Ann will develop a proposal on the general topic of guidelines for student services and data release policies/challenges in a federated world. She will send the proposal to the list and submit it to EDUCAUSE.
 
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Attribute Release White Paper
 
There was a discussion about attribute release. See the draft on the wiki:
https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/InCCollaborate/Attribute+Release+-+Version+2+-+DRAFT
 
The University of Washington is developing its group infrastructure to use for, among other things, access control for portals, wikis, and mailing lists. One of the issues is balancing the need for visibility of groups and group members with institutional requirements for protecting some information.
 
Mark mentioned that interpretation of FERPA varies from campus to campus, even in a multi-campus system. This could make it difficult to develop a standard. The key problem is the classification of data and the need for appropriate and useful attributes. Data classification becomes more complex when the data is released to a college or department and there are fewer controls over how the data is used. While universities have contracts with third-party providers over data use and release, this is not the case when data is distributed internally.
 
The discussion turned to having a consent and retraction mechanism would that comply with FERPA. It would be ideal to have a way to track who provided consent for which attributes at what time. That would comply with FERPA’s main tenet – that a user’s consent guide the information release.
 
Bob will update the Attribute Release draft on the wiki
 
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Next Call

February 20, 2009 at 3:00 pm (EST)