Interfederation

[Tom Scavo <>]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 2:49 PM, John Krienke 
<>
 wrote:
>
> - Support & Complaints. There is an expectation for a "reasonable" level of 
> support between Participating Federations; any federations' members must 
> only direct support to its parent Federation and not expect support 
> directly from eduGAIN participating Federations. For any given member 
> organization, only its parent Federation rules apply in support and 
> complaint cases.

Complaints are one thing, support is another. (I recall discussing
this briefly on one of the calls but it bears repeating here.) In the
InCommon Federation, support is completely decentralized. In other
words, if two partners (an IdP and SP) are having difficulty
interoperating, it is up to them to figure out how to resolve the
issue---the Federation operator doesn't get involved. I assume that
same mode of operation will continue regardless of where in the world
the partners are located.

This pretty much requires contacts in metadata IMO. InCommon will
export metadata with contact information and I expect we will only
import metadata with contact information, otherwise there's no way for
the partners to communicate. I realize this is going to cause problems
for some Federations but I don't see any alternative.

Tom