At TNC2013 we hosted another successful REFEDS meeting. Nearly 70 people gave up their Sunday to help us progress the REFEDS agenda – as well as impressive multi-tasking from the knitters in the crowd. The day saw a packed agenda, and as usual a significant number of new activities have sprung up as a result of that meeting. Here are some of the areas we will be progressing over the upcoming months, and there are a variety of ways you can be involved. Sign up for a working group, monitor the main REFEDS mailing list or of course, fund us!
- At the request of the community, we have established a closed Federation Operators Group (FOG). This will allow people involved specifically in operating a federation to have discussions on more technical and sensitive issues than are appropriate for the open REFEDS list. To join, your application must be supported by 2 existing members of the FOG group. More details about the group are available on the REFEDS wiki.
- More details about the REEP pilot were announced. The REEP pilot is currently accepting entity registrations from the community. Over the next few months, federations will be invited to start consuming entity data from REEP and by the end of 2013 a report will be made to the community on what impact a full production REEP registry would have on the community.
- Progress on MET2 was announced. MET (Metadata Explorer Tool) is intended to help federations and other interested parties provide management data on current federation usage worldwide. By October 2013, a fully functioning service will be made available. A pilot service is available for experimentation now.
- An LOA Working Group will also be established to progress the aim of developing a baseline LOA for research and education identity federations. The scope of this work is already available on the REFEDS wiki – please keep an eye out on the REFEDS list for more information.
- In conjunction with GEANT3+, REFEDS is working with a set of specific research usecases from large international collaborations to help them make the most of identity federation infrastructure. This includes help with edugain, moonshot and further discussion on future requirements such as attribute authorities. TERENA has also committed to supporting a second VAMP (Virtual Organisations CAMP) in October 2013, reaffirming the importance of links to our user community.
- We were also thrilled to received a lot of good feedback on the REFEDS Discovery Guide. This is the first step in a suite of information that REFEDS is creating to lower the barriers of federation usage for Service Providers. The community supported this aim and asked REFEDS to focus on these support materials in the upcoming months.
As well as the formal REFEDS workplan, REFEDS remains an open forum where ideas, issues and requests from across the international federation community are discussed. We were pleased to welcome a range of discussions as part of the open REFEDS agenda, including update on GEANT Federation-as-a-service work and the SUNET Student IdP work to name just two. All of the presentations are available on the REFEDS website.
Finally, everyone at REFEDS wishes Licia and Klaas the very best wishes as they begin their parenthood journey. Licia will be away for a short period of time, but we know that absence will be felt!
If you have any questions about REFEDS, its formal workplan, the working groups or how to participate in our open meetings please do get in touch. We look forward to seeing many people at the next REFEDS meeting in October.