BOF: Collaborating on Collaboration: are we going somewhere?

3 June 2010, @ TNC (Vilnius, Lithuania)

Notes: Licia Florio

  1. Introduction

This BoF explored opportunities for NRENs to collaborate, discussed some of areas in which collaboration would be desireble and identified use-cases that would benefit from such collaboration. The BoF also looked at TERENA's role to support NRENs collaboration.

The attendees split in sub-groups each of which provided their use-cases for collaboration. The following use-cases were identified.

 2. Use-cases emerged during the BoF

Group 1

This group looked at models in which services could be offered, namely:

• One NREN providing a service for everybody. This model can work for wikis, conference-call facilities or more in general for services that are already available on the market for which customization is needed rather than development. Other NRENs would 'buy' the service they need from the NREN that offers them.
• NRENs collaboration to finance outsourcing development; an example of this is the TCS eScience portal.
• NRENs could collaborate also on policy issues. It was noted that similar issues are addressed by TF-MSP, the TERENA Task-Force on Management of Service Portfolios.

This group also provided a model for types of collaboration (a scale) ranging from individuals working together (left-hand side of the scale) to NRENs working together (right-hand side of the scale). The more collaboration shifts from left to right, the higher the level of politics.

In what concerns TERENA's role, this group indicated the following:

• Offering a meta-service (similar to service-catalogue) to collect and list all services NRENs offer. Andras Kovacs noted that a similar thing was created a few years ago to support H.323 services, so he wondered whether this tool should be revitalized and expanded. Ken Klingenstein noted that ideally such a catalogue could encompass also services offered beyond Europe (a sort of a trans-Europe service discovery capability).
• Offering an adobe service to all TERENA's members.
• Offering a jabber server for all TERENA's members.
• Offering a code repository.
• Offering a COmanage service.

Group 2

The use-case identified by this group concerned lobbying. Some of the attendees feel that the R&E community is not particularly good at promoting themselves as whole.

Areas to lobby would include Data Protection and service providers. Licia Florio noted lobbying is also in the REFEDs scope.

It was also noted that identifying who (which NRENs and which person within the NRENs) is doing what is not always trivial; one possible solution to address this issue would be to offer a federated XMPP that would glue various information together. TERENA was nominated to run this service.

Group 3

This group identified the following use-cases:

• Services across NRENs boundary, for instance the TCS portal could be re-used (or modified) to offer a European MCU reservation system. In this case it would be interesting investigating the costs as well as the user's support for such a system.
• Support for VOs at international level - Niels noted that NRENs should really offer this as NRENs are already supporting collaboration at various levels. A light-weighted approach to address this need would be for NRENs to offer and package the VO software and let the VOs to operate that. This point also raises the issues on how to federate VOs platform, i.e. LIGO is already used in many countries.

Niels suggest creating a small group to discuss VOs collaboration tools, which would hold monthly conference calls. He volunteered to lead the group.

It was noted that duplication of work should be avoided. Work on VOs platforms is planned in GN3 and support for VOs is also one of the topics on the REFEDs roadmap. Licia Florio suggested scoping the use-cases and verifying whether some of them could be addressed by GN3 and TF-EMC2.

Group 4

This group identified the possibility of sharing security tools as a use-case for NRENs collaboration. The group also indicated the domestication of application as a use-case. Domestication has to be read as using applications that can handle out-of-band identity provision and vetting and can support roles defined outside the application.

 3.  Summary

All the attendees agreed that the NRENs community mostly shares documents and best practices and they could further share calendars (especially in the case of people working on a common project).

Alex Reid noted that most of the content sharing takes place at campus level (shared classes, courses and so on), so he suggested understanding boundary between the relative responsibilities of NRENs and Campuses.

On a more general note attendees noted that collaboration would help NRENs to offer some services which NRENs would not be able to offer alone; TCS was mentioned as an example of this.

One of the issues identified by the attendees is how to discover what NRENs are working on. It was noted that the TERENA compendium contains some of the information, but it was suggested setting up a registry to address this point (or a service-catalogue); pros-cons of  such a tool should be evaluated.

The need to have applications that can handle out-of-band identities and can support roles defined outside the application was also discussed; this falls into the domestication area. It was noted that NRENs are not best positioned to turn into application developers, but they should talk to specific service providers and software vendors and present to the NRENs needs to them. Lobbying in this area would help.

Tools to support VOs is a hot-topic; it was agreed to define use-cases and to start discussing them on the EMC2 list, which reaches out beyond Europe.

It was also agreed to engage more with TF-MSP to discuss tendering procedures and cost-sharing models. For instance if the NRENs would agree to do more on the federated XMPP, would this be a topic to be discussed within TF-MSP?

As far as TERENA is concerned, attendees identified a number of services that TERENA is well positioned to offer, such a COmanage service, adobe service, jabber server.

Niels and Licia agreed to look at some of the proposal and investigate their feasibility.

Attendees

Matjaz Batic Finzgar                          Arnes

Matthew Cocker                         The University of Auckland

Tomi Dolenc                                     ARNES

John Dyer                                     TERENA

Antônio Carlos F. Nunes             RNP

Licia Florio                                    TERENA

Tom Fryer                                     DANTE

Victoriano Giralt                         University of Malaga

Jens Haeusser                                     Canadian Access Federation

Thorkild Jensen                         Forskningsnettet/UNI-C

Leif Johansson                                    NORDUNET

Ken Klingenstein                         Internet2

Martin Kos                                     SWITCH

Andras Kovacs                                     NIIF

Diego Lopez                                     RedIRIS

Marcus Mannarino                         RNP

Jaime Leonardo Martinez Rodriguez             Universidad del Cauca

Ingrid Melve                                     Uninett

Tananun Orawiwattanakul             National Institute of Informatics

Remco Poortinga                        SURFnet

Alex Reid                                     AARNet

Jan Ruzicka                                     CESNET

Peter Schober                                     University of Vienna

Goran Skvarc                                     CARNet

Mariapaola Sorrentino                         DANTE

Milan Sova                                    CESNET

Magnus Strømdal                         UNINETT

Niels van Dijk                                     SURFnet

Torbjörn Wiberg                         Umeå Universitet/SWAMI

Beatriz Zoss                                     Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa / RNP