REFEDS work plans are developed by and for the community, changing as they need to and staying the same where appropriate. With a decade of work plans on record, the community continues to evolve the identity federation landscape to meet the needs of the Research and Education universe.
For 2022, the community requested two new working groups:
- Future Protocols – A working group to look at existing specifications to determine if and how they might become more protocol agnostic. The goal is to allow enough flexibility to support SAML, OIDC, DIDs, and future undeveloped protocols.
- Best Practices for Integrating with Microsoft Azure – Many federation operators have reported challenges with integrating with Microsoft Azure platforms. This group would establish a community of individuals interested in supporting each other with these integrations and documenting best practices as they are developed.
Both groups are in need of chairs to get started; if you’re interested, please let the REFEDS coordinators know.
One new Promotion and Communication item is the kick-off of a new set of online meetings for the community to discuss and raise awareness for some of the work coming out of REFEDS. Proposed topics include a report on the REFEDS Survey, the Data Protection Code of Conduct, various Entity Category efforts (including a different direction for R&S), platform-specific conversations, general federation maturity / baseline (recording available), Assurance updates, and more. We will record these meetings with an eye towards sharing them with people in various time zones. Different regions are encouraged to form “watch parties” to build their local federation communities.
Administrative work items have continued over from year to year. This year will (hopefully) see us start to come back to more in-person opportunities for the community to get together and rebuild the social bonds that help create that intangible trust that is a part of holding our federations together. Have you registered for the REFEDS meeting yet? If you’re attending in person, registration will be required to be allowed into the venue. If you’re remote, we will have support for remote participation.
If you have ideas for additional work items for the year, please share your thoughts on the REFEDS mailing list or on our slack channel. We’d love to hear your ideas!