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Interworking governance refers to the global “set of business, legal, and technical definitions, policies, specifications, and contracts by which the members of a trust community agree to be governed in order to achieve their desired objectives.[1]” consensually shared between education and research federations. This governance framework is needed to establish trust in the policies and procedures used to operate public DID[2] utilities.

Several organisations contribute worldwide to the governance of the current global digital interfederation infrastructures in education and research. At the higher governance level GÉANT, CAREN, RedCLARA and EUMED represent NRENs at different global regions. The eduGAIN service connects these identity federations and establishes trustworthy information exchange between them.

These organisations operate in the education and research eco-system on the basis of policies, rules and technologies trusted by all members. In the current federal model these policies and rules are the governance instruments of co-operation between the different national research and education networks (NRENS) coordinated by the GÉANT association in the particular global context of education and research sector.

GÉANT’s general assembly is the highest governing body. The members of the general assembly, who are representative members of the NRENS elect a board of directors responsible for managing and administering the organisation which operates in Amsterdam and Cambridge under the executive responsibility of the CEO and the managers. This federation government board enforces the rules and specifications that enable interoperability and trust in the federated model.

Interwork governance includes the establishment and updating of these rules, specifications and policies by the GÉANT general assembly composed by representatives of the different NRENs[3]. Moreover, the interwork governance benefits from the long-lasting collaboration with the European Union[4] by co-funding global projects.

Interworking governance in the federated model leads to specific expectations about the federations participants’ procedures for validating identities to access services. For this, federations need specific institutionalised documents. These include organisational documents (i. e. participation agreements, certification and accreditation documents), technical and operational documents (i. e. PKI) and legal documents (i. e. data privacy).

Several aspects of the distributed identities model will contribute to transform the interwork governance mode.

Transformative aspects

The most significant transformative trigger of the distributed identities model is the interconnection between different sectors (i. e. health, labour market, travel, banking, etc.).

Interfederation co-operations need to expand their awareness towards other sectors. This is a challenge for interoperability in terms of the semantic, legal and technical definitions they implement to interact. Transformative aspects include:

- Semantic interoperability between different sectors beyond education and research to ensure common understanding

- Cryptographic architecture mode (i. e. public permissioned blockchain networks).

- Legal aspects at global levels

- Technical definitions and specifications.

Opportunities

From a sectoral perspective, the inter-cooperation and expanded communication with other sectors beyond education and research constitute an opportunity to establish policies for the specific needs connected to the education and research sector.

- Timely establishing technical definitions and specifications as well as cryptographic architecture modes and privacy and security policies and procedures (s. i. e. Post-Quantum Cryptography implementation roadmap in the EU: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reco/2024/1101/oj) ..

- Establishing a dialogue with other sectors (i. e. professional organisations at labour markets; social security sector. S. i. e. European Public Health Association EUPHA https://eupha.org/)

- …

Risks

- Adaptation to sector-external norms and rules due to a delay in the establishment of own-sector standards for distributed identities.

- Fragmented reactions from NRENS due to the different behaviours with distributed identities at the national (i. e. EIDAS implementation) and international levels.