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

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

* Chan, Toby [ITS] <toby.chan AT polyu.edu.hk> [2018-04-13 04:02]:
> Is there any SPs you know which offers service generally to all
> eduGAIN users (for free)? I've tried to dig into the entities
> database but it seems many of those were targeting specific user
> groups or require a subscription.

Well, eduGAIN only has a subset of services that exist in individual
federations (it has no services of its own), so if the kind of
services you're looking for do not exist in member federations -- or
it does not make sense to expose them to other federations/regions --
then you can't find them in eduGAIN.

Also note that the negation of services "targeting specific user
groups" is something rather specific, too: You seem to be asking for
services that are useful too any and all kinds of people, everywhere?
(What would be the analogon outside federations?? MS-Word? Facebook?)

Anyway, a few services I personally think could be useful to a more
general audience are (massively incomplete, with almost 2000 SAML SPs
in eduGAIN):

* Foodle -- though that sadly is currently in the process of being
  decommissioned with no obvious replacement (maybe loomio or
  framadate, but someone has to run this for the community; or maybe
  $someone takes over running foodle "as is" from UNINETT).

* Okeanos global -- though by far not everyone has a need to easily
  spin up and throw away again virtual machines with IPv4 and IPv6
  connectivity connected to the GEANT network. I certainly do,
  sometimes.

* Unity http://unity.ac -- an instance of the apereo Open Academic
  Environment provided by Research Ltd.. You can create groups there
  (managed or opt-in to anyone), upload and share and comment on
  documents (or links/URLs), have discussions (plain text with
  Markdown support) and have a place for access-controlled Etherpads
  (nicely integrated). OAE's multi-tenancy model does not map 1:1 to
  our multi-party federation model (e.g. not all IDPs in eduGAIN can
  log in, only institutions for which a "tenancy" was set up, though
  that includes several thousand already, but it's workable, I think.
  (If you don't find your institution there you can ask to have it set
  up. Or you use the fall-back instance at https://network.unity.ac/
  which allows local registration, https://network.unity.ac/signup )
  I'm not aware of large take-up, however, even though this could have
  been the killer-service many have been looking for, IMHO.

* Filesender may be more generally useful (to anyone having to share
  very large data with others, esp without assuming too much technical
  know-how or tooling to be available to the sender and/or the
  recipient), though by its very nature (you'll want the fastest
  possible network connection to a/the/your filesender instance) it
  does not lend itself well to usage across eduGAIN either.
  And while you still might find quite a few Filesender instances in
  eduGAIN almost all of them are unusable by default, on a scale that
  warrants its own posting (forthcoming).

* Other than that: Probably any wikis and mailing list self-service
  interfaces. Event registration/management: Not sure if GEANT Eventr
  and CERN's Indico services are generally available or only meant for
  events concering the GEANT or CERN communities respectively (and
  again the target audience is very specific: people organising and
  managing events).

There cetainly are lots more if one spends a bit more time thinking
about the use-case(s).

-peter