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

[Peter Schober <peter.schober AT univie.ac.at>]

* Glenn Wearen <glenn.wearen AT heanet.ie> [2014-12-02 09:19]:
> Your analogy is a good one, however, let me refine it; gaining a
> consensus on affiliation would be like asking *the world* to decide
> on driving on a particular side of the road, roads that already
> carry a lot of traffic in some parts.

That, and the fact that sometimes not all parts even within a single
university can agree on a detailed definition of what a "student" is
covering all corner cases (to chose just one example of an affiliation
value, and one of the less problematic internationally). In some
countries that may be defined by law, making it convenient (and
sensible) for actors in those countries to outsource the decision and
just re-use that defintion. But of course other countries may have
other defintions equally grounded in different laws. Now, who will
give up compatibility with their local definition and adopt a
different regime, to satisfy the desire of "the global research
community" for semantic harmonisation?

Now look away further from a single institution, region or country,
across continents and cultural barriers. We probably don't have a
shared understanding of what "peace" or "enough to eat" means, what
makes you think "we" will have a globally shared definition -- and
incidently one that just happens to match your specific use case
exactly -- of what "an academic" is?

What I'd like to see is a sufficiently detailed writeup of the
requirements of the license agreements in your use case, in a way that
can be easily operationalzed globally and federation operators can
help institutions the world over to map local/internal data structures
onto a shared eduPersonEntitlement value for your use case.
(If they can be made to care about your use case, that is. Which we
cannot guarantee either, which undoubtedly you will blame NRENs for
too, that we cannot mandate autonomous institutions to do what we want
them to.)

Best regards,
-peter