InCommon Technical Discussions

[Scott Koranda <>]

Hi,

> ********************
> Break InCommon into two effective federations:
> 
> One federation would be those campuses that want to support a national
> infrastructure that facilitates collaboration in higher education and 
> research.
> It would require IdPs to support the R&S entity category. The other 
> federation
> would be for campuses that just want streamlined access to vendor SPs. Those
> campuses that want to collaborate could then evolve faster.
> ********************

The context was making progress on the stalled issue of scaling
attribute release.

It is not a technical suggestion, though it would of course have
technical ramifications.

My observation is that there are roughly 100 InCommon Participant
campuses that could and would, if mandated, implement changes
to make the trust fabric more scalable and simply more trusted. Things
like

- attribute release to all R&S SPs in eduGAIN
- populating MDUI elements
- up to date and correct errorURL elements
- security contacts in metadata
- support for SIRTFI (security incident response)
- consumption of per-entity metadata

I expect those 100 or so organizations could make that happen in a year
or less. They already "pay attention" and have most of it in place
already.

The other 300 or so organizations, more generally, are not interested in
creating and sustaining a trusted fabric for facilitating
collaboration and research. They have other concerns.

Yet a lot of energy and resources are spent attempting to motivate those
300 to operate like the 100, even though those 300 fundamentally do not
have the drivers that might push them to operate at the higher level.

So my proposal is to stop trying. 

Instead let the 100 evolve quickly to a higher level and call that
"InCommon".

The other 300 could be called something like "InCommon light" or
"InCommon basic". They would not have to meet the same level of
performance and achieve the same level of interoperability, but they
would also receive less services, and consume less resources.

My proposal is to solve the attribute release problem by scoping it to
the Participants that can actually solve it, and build a better
federation on that foundation.

Thanks,

Scott K for LIGO