Many of you will have seen the invitation to the Federated Access: Future Directions (no jokes about boldly going) event being held in Birmingham on 30th June 2008. The agenda is here, and we would love to see you there.

The main purpose of the event is to help us plan the next JISC programme on access and identity management. We will be holding brainstorming sessions in the afternoon to ask attendees what they would like to see in the Programme. I’d like to be able to take ideas from the community in to these meetings so we can have a solid basis to start discussion. As such I’d like to invite you all to provide suggestions for future areas of work by commenting on this posting. If you are shy, please feel free to also e-mail me directly.

To get you started, there are some ideas below. These are just ideas that have been suggested to us and comments are welcome. Our programmes are only as good as you help us make them so please do speak out.

Possible future directions for access and identity management

- a developers forum to allow for joint development of toolkits across the community with a solid coding platform and management.
- tools for librarians to manage groups.
- work to integrate attributes within ERMs.
- recommendations for extended use of attributes within institutions.
- a review of licensing of content for virtual organisations.
- more work with CardSpace and OpenID.
- a study on the importance of cultural identity and digital identity.
- pilots for pre-course access with UCAS codes.
- account linking.
- support for Shibboleth 2.0.