An open discussion list for topics related to the eduGAIN interfederation service.

[Brook Schofield <schofield AT terena.org>]

All,

on the eduGAIN Status Page:

   http://edugain.org/technical/status.php

we now have 20 federations that participate in eduGAIN and a further five (5) federations that are in the process of joining. The last section on that page lists five (5) "candidate" federations.

The original reason for having these "candidate" federations was due to the previous governance structure of eduGAIN and the role of the NREN-PC in approving a federation joining. Because this was deemed to be a heavy weight process (and the meetings of the NREN-PC are not that frequent) an original list of 27 Federations was drawn up and approved on the 5th September 2011. This list had an addition (Belnet) on 16th May 2012 and two more (TAAT & COFRe) on 6th February 2013.

Out of this list of 30 federations (27+1+2) we now have 25 joining/participating.

Now that the revised eduGAIN constitution is effective (since 30 September 2013) it is the eduGAIN Steering Group whose role is to approve new federations joining.

This old document provides an "express pass" to joining eduGAIN which bypasses the eSGs role. So I'd like to know whether "candidate" federations should proceed through the entire joining process (including the Steering Group approval) and whether we can broaden the list of federations to match the list from REFEDS:

   https://refeds.org/resources/index.html

Maybe a name change from "candidate" to something like "Recognised Federations" or "Known Federations" would serve the new purpose. There are enough federations within eduGAIN that expanding this list to known federations won't make it look like eduGAIN isn't supporting the community.

The next challenge is to see how we can encourage federations to publish IdPs and SPs into their metadata stream for eduGAIN ;-)

-Brook

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Brook Schofield, TERENA Project Development Officer
TERENA Secretariat, Singel 468 D, 1017 AW Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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