eduGAIN SG-2019 December

eduGAIN Steering Group Meeting

Tuesday 10th December 2019, 14:00 - 15:00 CET (in your timezone)

Please Note that the above time is CONFIRMED.

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Attendance

Federations in Attendance (xx)

1. ...

Attendees (xx)

1. Casper Dreef, GÉANT
2. Davide Vaghetti, IDEM/GARR
3. Terry Smith, AAF
4. Brook Schofield, GÉANT
5. Nicole Harris, GÉANT

Apologies (xx)

1. Saeed Khademi. IRFED
2. Wolfgang Pempe (DFN-AAI, travelling)
3. ....

Notes

Welcome, Introductions & Agenda Agreement

The Chair welcomed everyone to the 4rd meeting of 2019 ...

See the Open Actions & Previous Meeting notes. The major open action will be covered within the meeting.

Minutes of the previous meeting were approved. All action remain open.

Membership Updates and Joining

For details on new members and candidates see https://technical.edugain.org/status and work on progressing new members is underway.

Four (4) federations participated in eduGAIN since the last meeting.

Four (4) candidates currently under assessment.

• China / CSTCloud Federation - 18-Oct-2019
• Slovakia / safeID - 24-Oct-2019
• Mexico / FENIX - 21-Nov-2019
• Tajikistan / TARENA Identity Federation - 28-Nov-2019

eduGAIN Town Hall

Possibly in March 2020, but needing to include topics broader than just eduGAIN to justify travel + wider participation (to include eduroam, possibly REFEDS WGs, invite FIM4R, FIM4L, possibly some “CAMP” type sessions). This will be coordinated by Casper Dreef and was broadly supported. Desirable to have the dates flagged early to support travel + visa processing requirements. Both dates + location needed. A Town Hall hasn't been convened since 2017, the end of 2018 event was skipped because of the preparation of the GN4-3 project. This event is to have a global focus to better support transcontinental travel.

eduGAIN "baselining"

The eduGAIN Compliance Issues wiki page has been updated but required more attention and this is an ongoing process.

• Countries in Europe with no Federation, currently only available for Europe, extend to all regions?

Validator report at https://technical.edugain.org/profile_v2 now shows:

• 4 red (non-compliant) - Belnet, MATE, Oman KID, WAYF
• 44 yellow (partially compliant)
• 15 green (fully compliant)

The AAF situation is due to the logo requirement for discovery. Pål also highlighted the logo issue as not being important. Rhys stated that priority needs to be with the RED (non-compliant) issues. Davide explained that the eduGAIN Support team is able to contact federations to work on these issues.

Note: Belnet corrected their compliance situation to Partially Compliant after the meeting. The 4/44/15 now stands at 3/44/18.

Resolving eduGAIN issues

R&S, SIRTFI, baselining, validators and the many other tools are all helping to resolve and even prevent issues occuring for a researcher in one federation seamlessly accessing a service on the other side of the planet. When it all works great!

But when it doesn't determining the fault can be complex. Issues include;

• federation and organisation policies
• awareness
• working across many organisational and national boundaries
• working across time zones

Simple guidance for commuities communicating issues and identifying parties that need to be involved?

Improving awareness for organisations and federations interoperating and particularly sharing and tracking the issues and the solutions.

Terry provided an example of a R&S service within Australia having difficulty working with a UK Federation identity provider not supporting R&S. Liaising with Jisc has been useful as they want to promote R&S within their federation. Chris Phillips highlighted that there are services that required SIRTFI in addition to R&S and sometimes these issues are urgent or conveying the importance and urgency doesn't always pass between support functions. Davide highlighted that the resolution time can often be in the order of weeks. Davide to provide statistics on eduGAIN support topics/issues for the next meeting.

Who and how to provide guidance is an open issue for a different forum.

Future meetings

The next SG meeting was confirmed to take place on Tuesday 10th December 2019 13:00 UTC Drop in sessions:

• 15th October *Asia* 7:00 UTC / 9:00 Amsterdam / 00:00 Los Angeles / 3:00 Washington / 18:00 Sydney
       - https://timeanddate.com/s/3skv

• 12th November *Americas* 20:00 UTC / 21:00 Amsterdam / 12:00 Los Angeles / 15:00 Washington / 07:00 Sydney
       - https://timeanddate.com/s/3skw

Terry highighted some topics from the previous drop in sessions:

• Need for usage statistics is major driver of FIM4L and displacing EZproxy.
  
• Service Catalogue (although there is a range of work groups on this topic).

Chris raised the issue of discussion documents on service catalogue. Terry highlighted emerging federations needing a service catalogue to point people toward a service - in a follow-up email he also flagged REFEDS Service Catalogue Best Practices and 2018 REFEDS Workplan. Pål highlighted the fact that with more than 3000 SPs within eduGAIN it is difficult to curate and maintain a list. Terry highlighted the desire of service providers to provide good information to encourage update of their service. Chris flagged the importance of a service might differ between federations.

AoB and Close

• Zoom connections URLs and use of Zoom for future meetings? The WebRTC will be promoted for future meetings.

The meeting closed at 15:45 and encouraged all to attend the next drop in session and the SG meeting in December, coordinates to follow.