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

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

* Ian Young <ian AT iay.org.uk> [2015-07-03 11:20]:
> If the CLARIN federation was run along similar lines to the way we
> expect other eduGAIN participant federations to be run (in terms of
> policies, procedures, metadata handling and the like) then I don't
> think there would be any problem in principle with the CLARIN ERIC
> joining eduGAIN.

1. CLARIN is hell-bent on getting redundant copies of all entities
they have a legal mandate to manage into federations, esp incl. their
non-interfederated feeds. So having their entities in eduGAIN doesn't
solve what they consider to be their problem (access to /all/ IDPs in
their target federations).

2. The CLARIN ERIC has power of attorney over a number of SPs (let's
call them "the CLARIN SPS") and as such registers those SPs
redundantly with every of their target federations.
Nothing stops them from opting in all those SPs into eduGAIN at the
same time. In fact there is no reason they should not do that.
(Preferrably not in /all/ of the federations, but we can figure that
out among ourselfs, and that's still better than in none.)

So while I don't see CLARIN "joining eduGAIN" as something out of the
question (and indeed we might change eduGAIN to accomodate that) it
neither solves what they claim is their problem, not is it necessary
to get all CLARIN SPs into eduGAIN today.
The only thing that's needed is the SPs themselfs joining their local
federation (or any other!) and either opting in to eduGAIN (or at
least not opt out). That's already the case for all of the CLARIN SPs,
with the exceptionn of maybe 1 or 2, so that's a non-issue.

That's not to say that the current process of registering and
distributing SAML metadata from the CLARIN SPF is fine as it is.
-peter