Programme Management

An interesting question for you all on a sunny thursday afternoon. I have been working on a small internal project for sometime to try and sort out unique identifiers for JISC. This is inspired mostly by the work I am doing to ‘FED-up’ our services but also to improve communication flow across the Executive.

I have my URI schema fairly well sorted out right down to the project level, but here I am stuck. My question:

Should project ‘identifiers’ (for administration) and project ‘tags’ (for communication) be one and the same?

I have come up with the following approaches:

1. ASSIGN A NUMERIC IDENTIFIER TO EACH PROJECT AGAINST PROGRAMME NAME. For example JiscDEPO/001. This will meet all my administration needs, can be assigned at the point of grant letter issue, avoids any clashes etc. etc. However it will mean that projects have several identifiers / tags and is non-intuitive so you will probably have to keep on looking back to your grant letter to remember if you are asked.
2. ASK PROJECTS TO DEFINE A TAG AT PROJECT PROPOSAL STAGE. We have already issued advice on tagging and it would be easy to collate these and issue grant letters against a project defined tag. This example would be JiscDEPO/origamipro to make up a project tag. The only real problem here is that tags will be created for projects that don’t get funded and there would be no way to distinguish a formally funded project from a project proposal.
3. COLLATE IDENTIFIERS FOR PROJECTS AT PROJECT PLAN STAGE. This is more of an administrative burden, and means there is no identifier in the funding letter, which I am quite keen to establish.

What do people think? Am I being over zealous trying to collate identifiers for administration with tags that have a different purpose in life? Am I strange to even be thinking about this at all? Is there ‘another way’? Ideas on the usual comments-postcard please.

So yesterday was the first programme meeting of the JISC AIM Programme, being ably led by Chris Brown. I won’t go in to too much detail about all of the nine projects, as you can see for yourself on the JISC website. Instead, I will try and tell you the things that struck me from the day.

Things I am excited about:

• I think I may have already mentioned that I am very interested in the RAPTOR project as I think the stats tool they are producing will provide real and immediate benefit to universities and colleges throughout the UK. They are looking for people who would be willing to product test for them – so do get in touch if you would like to be involved!
• The SMART project will look at the emerging UMA (User Managed Access) protocol that is part of the Kantara Initiative. I’m really pleased to see some real UK effort going in to Kantara, and as far as I know, this is the first project we have funded that really looks at the tricky problem of getting students firmly engaged as the ‘managers’ of their identity. This is definitely one to watch.

Things I am curious about:

• The Identity and Access Using Social Networking Technologies Project (phew, now you know why we use acronyms) is a fascinating look at how we might use the Friend-of-a-Friend vocabulary within the NGS and the UK federation access management approaches. I find this really interesting, particularly as it tackles the complexities of both describing people’s relationships rather than just their memberships and the tricky issue of delegation. As I mentioned on twitter, I’m worried about creating a user-friendly interface to allow this complexity to be managed. I’m sure the project team are up for the challenge though!

Things I am worried about:

The recurring theme of the day was, ‘how do we make institutions populate x…..’. Encouraging institutions within the UK to both use richer attributes sets and tackle the group management problem is something I am very keen on. It is something that is encouraged within the recently published Identity Management Toolkit but is a problem we have yet to solve. I would really like to see JISC fund some more projects to help universities and colleges take the next steps to have rich attributes and well manged group systems and would be interested to hear your views on what we should do next in this space to make this happen.

My advice to the projects was to really understand their use case. Do they have attributes they need everyone in the UK to adopt? Is there instead a small group of target institutions? Are there IdPs in other federations that would need to adopt the attributes? Is this a virtual organisation or larger community problem? I also encouraged the projects to use each other as test sites and to make use of the lovely people on the jisc-shibboleth mailing list who are always happy to come forward and give their opinions and support!

My final recommendation is that smaller VO style projects might be more interested in looking at lightweight metadata aggregation than working within the structures of formal national federations. Andreas Solberg has some really interesting tools and ideas on his blog that are definitely worth looking at. I’m interested in these concepts as they challenge our expectations of where ‘federation’ metadata is published, where it is aggregated and by whom.

Challenging our processes and exploring new ways of implementing ideas is what innovation is all about, so I very much look forward to seeing more from these projects from the innovation arm of the JISC Access Management stable!

On the way to work this morning, whilst I was supposed to be writing a paper for JISC SMT (oops), I instead found myself thinking about a question that I posed to David Kernohan on Twitter a while ago – how does the Open Education Resources initiative impact on identity management? This in itself was not an unusual question – I tend to ask it about all of the initiatives in JISC as access and identity management are only important in the way that we embed them in to the practises put in place by other activities. At the time, I didn’t have much of an answer. Having attended UKSG, I think some thoughts on that area have started to infiltrate my brain!

I started by asking myself what is different about Open Educational Resources to the Open Access agenda. There are of course lots of answers to this question – but I focused on the medium. OER is very much a part of the social software / social networking / web 2.0 world that encourages people to make their stuff as widely available as possible, and encourages others to comment, annotate, reuse and repurpose that stuff. It is about changing the nature of the way we perceive content. The Open Access agenda does not as a whole look to change the concept of the published article; instead it wishes to change the business model by which the article is made available to its target audience.

This is important with regards to identity management. Open Access retains the fundamental link between author and object (published article) – allowing the author to be tracked across multiple articles and to build up a sense of identity across their publications. There is still a lot of work to be done in this space; author identifiers have still not been widely established and much of the association of author to subject area and the human relationship that author has with their institution, their subject, and the publication peer review process. Name is still the primary identifier – in the same manner as the equity system.

As we know, in the world of social networking, name is not a reliable identifier. I blogged a while back about the faux celebrity twitter accounts and the need for a better way of gaining assurance that the person talking is the person you think it is. The use of twitter raises an interesting question in relation to preservation and association of content in the social networking age. How will history capture Stephen Fry’s tweets alongside his blog posts, as compared to his books, plays, films, appearances on QI and other activities? Many of these have a preservation strategy and standard ways of associating the work with the identity in question. Open content, or content created in social spaces does not have such a strategy in place. How can I ensure that my identity remains linked to my content, that my content remains ‘published’ wherever it is created, that my history online can be traced and connected as part of my identity, and how important are all of these factors in the open content arena? Is it important that I remain identified with my content, even if I am happy to make it publicly available?

I think these will be interesting questions for the OER programme to look at alongside the challenge of making content available and encouraging uptake and usage in the educational community. As a starter, I have created a quick (and definitely not exhaustive or particularly well informed) review of the traditional publishing model against the use of open content – I hope it is useful!

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tag: ukoer

Back from UKSG and as usual found it to be a very useful event. The most common question I was asked other than questions about access management was, “this twitter thing, I don’t get it, what are you doing?”.

I spent quite a bit of the conference contributing to the twittering about the event at #UKSG09 and writing up sessions on both this blog and the Live Serials blog (an excellent record of the event by the way). I’m quite lucky in that I find it easy to write up sessions on the hoof, and actually find the need to explain a session to another audience helps me concentrate and focus more on what the speaker is saying. As many of you will know, I was a big twitter sceptic until a short while ago. So…

Why have I changed my mind?

1. It is a great way to be a virtual attendee at an event. I missed the JISC conference this year through illness but got a lot out of both the podcasts of the event and even more by being able to talk to people who were in session.
2. It enhances events as a back channel. The value that was added to each presentation at #uksg09 through twitter was impressive – people sent links, definitions of strange terms used, asked questions they didn’t have the chance to pose to the speakers, evaluated speakers on the fly, compared notes cross parallel sessions, and provided amusement when things were flat. A review of the #uksg09 tweets will probably be a far more useful event evaluation process than a review of the delegate evaluation forms.
3. It is as useful as a news channel as any of my other RSS feeds.
4. It is a good way of making new contacts and keeping in contact with colleagues. I meet several publishers face to face via twitter, and also learn a lot about what is going on in JISC – an almost impossible task normally due to the size and variance of our work.

What have I learnt?

1. Twitter is not e-mail – it is of the moment. You don’t have to and probably shouldn’t try and go back and read all the updates from people you are following if you have been offline for sometime. This is not your in-tray.
2. Use # tags wisely and well. If you want to review an area retrospectively, search # tags, not friends. If you want to be able to review areas retrospectively, use # tags so that you and others can easily find the information.
3. Instead of, not as well as. Blogs and microblogging can replace other types of communication and shouldn’t be seen as just another thing to do. If I’ve written up events on the blog, I don’t then write up separately in a formal report. If I’ve made a point on the blog or via twitter, I don’t send out via mailing lists as well. I don’t use either channel to rehash press releases but try to use as a way of indicating my thoughts on a topic.
4. Practise makes perfect. Everyone uses blogging and microblogging in slightly different ways but unless you give it a go, you won’t find your way of using it. You will make mistakes – tweeting too much of what a speaker is saying, tagging something to a formal event which is irrelevant to that tag, quickly venting and regretting later – but all of these are true of any form or medium of communication.

Finally, if you want to comment on work being carried out on federated access within the UK, please use the tag #ukfed.

Clearly we are moving from a startup Federation to a more mature evolved one. Part of this process is looking at End User experience and how that can be improved. So FYI:

Invitation to Tender for the JISC Collections Service Provider Interface Study

JISC Collections wishes to commission a study to explore the approaches taken by Service Providers to the implementation of federated access management, and its effect on the End User experience. The aim of the study is to make clear recommendations regarding common terminology and practices across service provider platforms to both improve the user experience and to ensure the maximum number of successful authentications.

It is expected that the project will be undertaken over a 4 month period between 30th March–20th July 2009.
The deadline for proposals is 12 noon on Monday 2nd March 2009.
Funding of up to £35,000 (including VAT, travel and subsistence) is available for the project.
Further information including the full ITT can be found at:

http://www.jisccollections.ac.uk/consultations.aspx

Mark writes:

JISC has just issued an ITT for third parties experienced in access management to bid to provide support to institutions who want to deploy a IdP. You might say that such support is already there, and to a degree much of it is. Particulary if you are an Institution employing an IT staff with the correct skill set, have an organised directory service, a significant subscription to JISC Collections resources and the strategic ambition to move forward on access management. However, and it is a big HOWEVER, its clear that there are enough institutions who can use the business case toolkit to determine that they want access management (and I mean the 100% proof type, not devolved outsourcing to a delegated authority), but who have also determined that its currently financially / technically out of reach. It is that group of institutions, which the successfull respondent to the ITT will be working with. The time will come for such institutions to submit applications for the help that the project will provide, but for the present – if you are a third party provider of access management support, with a desire to spend long hours setting up IdPs in grateful institutions all over the country – we want YOUR interest. And remember we encourage questions……

Today is the 3rd Meeting of JIIE for 2007, and the Committee was particularly focusing on the Information Environment (IE) Strategy, and the Users and Innovation Programme. A common theme was whether or not the word ‘presentation’ that is currently used in the IE architecture is appropriate in the changing world, or whether we should be talking more about ‘user interaction’.

Presentation of course suggests something managed by the institution and pushed out to the students – rather than user-lead model suggested by interaction.

This highlights the changing role of the institution as a broker between students and services, rather than as an infrastructure provider to students. It also refocuses on the scenarios where institutions do act as Service Providers – both to their own students and to students, institutions and indeed businesses elsewhere.

Ian Dolphin asked a series of questions, one of which was around the role of access management in this changing environment. Some of my thoughts on this:

• Federated Access does not negate user-centric identity and access management, as I often see suggested. Institutions should broker access for their students where appropriate..and it such as an institution brokering access to licensed resources on behalf of the student. This can be completely compatible with a user-lead approach.
• Users cannot effectively manage their own identities as yet, or verify their own identities – institutions are effective brokers in this scenario. The role of the broker and trusted verifier is very important to all user-centric identity management systems such as OpenID and identity metasystems.
• Attributes provide an effective way of providing information to enable user interaction, particularly when moving away from the concept that their is a presentation ‘layer’. JISC will shortly be issuing an ITT looking at the role attributes can play in providing a personalised experience.

Thankfully, this all fits nicely with the forward look for access and identity management within JISC – which is always a relief!

Just watched the Australian Federation (Introduction to AAF federated access management) remake of the JISC Introduction to Federated Access Management animation.

Glad to say that it seemed more like a shot by shot remake, in the same way that Gus Van Sant remade Psycho, rather than the “re-envisioning” of Planet of the Apes that Tim Burton did.

There is a serious point though, a major rational for Federating around the SAML standard – is interoperability. The Oz remake (the country, not one featuring CGI flying monkeys), proves that we face similar problems and that we would seem to be on the right track with similar solutions.

Certainly makes the sentence, “an international standard”, far more meaningful….