Interfederation

[Ian Young <>]

On 28 May 2013, at 21:36, Tom Scavo 
<>
 wrote:

> I'm pretty confident in saying eduGAIN metadata would NOT be bundled
> in the current InCommon aggregate.

It's worth clarifying which of the following you mean:

* nothing that comes through eduGAIN can ever be bundled into InCommon's 
production aggregate

* after reviewing participant registration policies, metadata from *some* 
eduGAIN participants and acquired through eduGAIN might be bundleable into 
InCommon's production aggregate

* nothing that comes through eduGAIN can ever be republished even as a 
separate "InCommon+interfederation" aggregate

* after reviewing participant registration policies, metadata from *some* 
eduGAIN participants and acquired through eduGAUN might be republishable as 
part of a separate "InCommon+interfederation" aggregate

Remember, there's really no such thing as "eduGAIN metadata", just metadata 
registered by eduGAIN participant federations that is aggregated by the 
eduGAIN service.

>> * Handling interfederation technical support, complaints, and incidents.
> 
> This, I think, is a steep "hidden" cost. In the InCommon Federation
> today, members work with each other to resolve problems (such as
> attribute resolution) but the InCommon admin staff don't generally get
> involved. If all of a sudden InCommon admin were to start receiving an
> influx of support requests, that would be a problem since we're not
> set up for that.

This is a concern for the UK as well, even though we have a pretty robust 
helpdesk in operation; you'll recall I said it was a principal reason why 
we're currently doing interfederation as an opt-in exercise.  We don't have 
the experience yet to know whether that's over-cautious or not.  Obviously 
I'm hoping that once we open interfederation up more broadly, we'll have 
found that it's not as high maintenance as we might have feared, but right 
now there's no real way to know.

        -- Ian