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

[Tomasz Wolniewicz <twoln AT umk.pl>]

Hi,
   My opinion on this would be as follows, it differs from the current Brook's practice.

1. We may list only those federations which have expressed an interest to be on the list, hence no implicit "membership".

2. The "Joining" category should be reserved for those who have signed the eduGAIN declaration and have been either pre-approved or approved by TSG. Their status will only change to "Members" when they are in production, fulfilling all requirements. In practice this will mean the following - pre-approved federations can jump to the joining status as soon as they have signed the declatation, federations requiring approval form TSG need to be recommended by the OT, which in my opinion can only happen after all necessary documents have been verified. Metadata feed would essentially be the only non-required condition.

3. The Candidate should be any federation which has expressed interest. These federations should formally exist but can be in various stages of readiness. There are no guarantees that these federations will be finally apprved, that what a "candidate" stands for, after all.

Tomasz

W dniu 24.10.2013, 17:08, Brook Schofield pisze:

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

--
===================================================
Brook Schofield, TERENA Project Development Officer
TERENA Secretariat, Singel 468 D, 1017 AW Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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-- 
Tomasz Wolniewicz    
  twoln AT umk.pl     http://www.umk.pl/~twoln

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