Strategy and Policy

This morning at #tnc2010 we kick off with a meeting on eduGain. In the past, I have always assumed that the UK would not be able to participate in eduGain due to its rather onerous entry level – mandatory attributes simply don’t fly in the UK. I still have some concerns, and think the lighterweight metadata aggregation process will be more successful in the longterm but I think we have to step up and at least try to address the requirements. It could still be that we fail.

Ingrid Melve asks why we need a centralised service for eduGain if it is an interfederation model? Valter Nordh paints a picture of a future service operation of 1 FTE – this will still be too heavyweight for some people and raises sustainability questions.

What happens to eduGain when the GEANT project stops? It has to have a home. Policy will need to be addressed and tweaked, and there needs to be a place for this to be agreed. REFEDS might have a role to play here, but it will be essential for the 20.3 FTEs assigned to eduGAIN to spend sometime planning this future.

For me at the moment I’m afraid it is less eduGain but where’s the gain? I’m going to push the appropriate people in the UK to see if we can be full participants but I don’t think the eduGain team, the closed development processes and the lack of future planning are making this a particularly easy case for us to sell.

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.

One of the things that we are looking at closely with the UK federation at the moment is a move towards a more seamless approach to metadata management. Metadata is clearly one of the most important things about a federation – it has all the information to allow IdPs and SPs to connect to each other. It is also critically important that the metadata is accurate – bad metadata could easily break the trust model of a federation.

However, metadata takes a long time to process, check and verify. One approach that federations have been taking to help streamline this process is to introduce systems where by members can automagically update their own metadata. A good example of this is the SWITCH AAI Resource Registry.

Implementing something like this for the UK federation is an interesting concept, but I still have a number of questions:

• What is the impact on members in terms of additional cost / time from having to upload their own metadata information?
• Is there a corresponding reduction in staff time and effort at the federation operator, and it is right to switch the balance of effort?
• How do we maintain integrity and accuracy of data? What would be the impact of incorrect data being passed through?
• What is an appropriate level of human intervention / checking of data with this automated process?

I’d be really interested to hear people’s thoughts on this process.

Of course, another option would be to adopt a more radical approach whereby Identity Providers and Service Providers host their own metadata and merely inform the federation of its location. This embraces the idea of a truly distributed service model…but is perhaps a step we are not yet ready for.

This week, I’m getting excited about statistics! Well, I need something down to earth to balance out the amazing experience of being at APAN29 in Sydney.

Just before I started at JISC, we had some long and detailed conversations about statistics as part of the ANGEL project. Whilst usage statistic work has mumbled on in the background but there hasn’t been any significant work in this area….until now. Like buses, JISC usage statistic projects all come at once.

Something I am very happy to see funded, particularly as I saw the birth of the project idea whilst walking on a very hot day in San Antonio, is the RAPTOR project at Cardiff University. At the moment, Shibboleth Identity Providers can produce very useful access logs for institutions, but in a format that is not particularly friendly or helpful to the needs of librarians who need to be able to quickly review and assess resource usage. RAPTOR will produce a toolkit to not only provide this functionality but also to integrate these statistics with EZProxy logs – a joined up approach which I’m sure will be appreciated.

Hand in hand with this, the UK federation are planning on producing a portal to allow institutions to upload appropriately anonymised statistics….possible using the outputs from RAPTOR if we are smart about it. This will give us an interesting national view of resource usage, useful for both JISC and JISC Collections in focusing attention on the requirements of our community.

At the other end of the picture, it is equally important that we look at Service Provider statistics to provide the more detailed view of user behaviour beyond the authentication point. JISC Collections have been examining the potential of a usage statistics portal that will aggregate statistics from COUNTER compliant reports provided by publishers. Again, the point here is to reduce the amount of time librarians are forced to spend aggregating this information.

To complete the picture, the PIRUS project is looking at usage statistics right down at the article level across both publisher resources and repositories. More information is available in this post from Ben Wynne. PIRUS has produced a review of what information would be required to provide article level statistics. My only concern about this report is ‘who’ section and the options described for identifying unique users. eduPersonTargetedID and eduPersonPrincipleName seem obvious candidates for potential unique identifiers but are missing from the report. The challenge here will be any suggestion that looks at tracking the same user across multiple Service Providers. Obviously this is useful information for institutions, publishers and authors, but the privacy issues and management of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) will have to be carefully examined.

So that is your usage stats round-up – certainly lots of good stuff to keep an eye on.

I’m spending the first morning at the Spring Internet2 meeting focusing on Grouper and COmanage, which fits in nicely with the discussions on the jisc-shib list on extending attribute usage.

Upcoming functionality in v1.5.0 of Grouper: namespace transition (i.e. the ability to move and copy groups), audit facilities, indirect membership management, and possible work on the attribute framework (in terms of adding parameters to groups in terms of a full understanding of what a role can do).

One of the interesting questions is around the attribute framework. The work of the Signet application, which assigned privileges to groups and individuals, did not take off as a standalone piece of work. This is now being developed as part of both Grouper and COmanage, but more work is needed to support this complex information flow.

The question of user interfaces was discussed by the group. SurfNet has done some work on a simple GUI to allow people to log-in with a federated ID and then manage their own groups. The University of Washington has is about to move towards a Grouper implementation using. The UI within the Grouper package is not seen as applicable to end-users – it is purely for systems administrators – so more work is needed in this area. In the UK, the University of Newcastle has done some work in this area as part of the G-FIVO project. For Grouper to be really applicable in the UK, I think that more work is needed on the UI issue – this may be an interesting area for the upcoming Access and Identity Management Programme.

Another area for development is the position of groups management within the institutional hierarchy, and understanding of ‘official’ institutional groups and hierarchy and those that have been developed for other purposes. The ‘official’ status of a group is very difficult to determine, but it is important to understand where and how a group was developed and its role within the institution. This will increase the opportunities for reuse of groups and labels – a positive thing from a management perspective.

COmanage is intended to be undetectable to end-users. COmanage being used in relation to Confluence should look like Confluence for end-users. However, unlike Grouper, COmanage is intended to focus on user interfaces to allow a larger groups of users to create and manage groups to facilitate wider use of collaboration management.

Some of the issues raised by the attendees at the group session were:

• Regular versus virtual organisations: revocation of user rights becomes complex;
• Pushing the tool beyond the educational domain;
• ‘Domesticating’ other tools to work with COmanage;

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

The second presentation in the general session is on the C-SPAN Library – again, apologies for being off-topic today.

The C-SPAN Library Archive plans to create an online, Indexed, accessible, digital video collection of all C-SPAN Programming from 1987 – present, including 150,000 hours of programming. C-SPAN captures important political recordings as a public service, and the archive seeks to make this resource a permanent record.

I’m using NewsFilmOnline as an example of a federated resource in the UK in a session later today and it is interesting to look at the comparison with C-SPAN. The sustainability question that is being closely examined by the Strategic Content Alliance is also of interest – C-SPAN receives no government funding but is funded by fees paid by cable and satellite affiliates who carry C-SPAN programming.

The service has a lot of advanced searching capability, including the ability to track usage of certain words within congress. This is interesting for organisations such as Internet2 and JISC as hot-topics can be tracked across debates, speeches and other recorded events.

After the usual welcome from Doug and being treated to a New Orleans tradition of being bombarded with Mardi Gras beads, the general session will start with an update from Tulane University on the impact of Hurricane Katrina.

Scott Cowen highlights the fact that New Orleans is still a tale of two cities. Whilst the french quarter and business district now show little sign of the impact of Katrina, the residential areas are still struggling. It is important that events like Internet2 keep on coming to New Orleans – and this is the best sign of support for the city. Katrina was the worst storm to hit the US in over 100 years.

Tulane University itself survived the storm itself very well due to its hurricane planning strategy. It was the breaking of the levies that caused damage – putting a significant part of the university underwater. Much of New Orleans was under water for 57 days – and Tulane University had to close its campus for an entire semester. The cost to the University was $650 million dollars.

Scott also reveals that his own escape plan included hot wiring a golf cart – not something usually required of a University President

The Tulane University survival plan:

1. To keep everyone on payroll for as long as possible;
2. To reach out to the Higher Education community and ask other institutions to support Tulane students;
3. To reopen in January 2006 regardless.

These were all achieved, with an impressive response from other US universities to support Tulane students.

The ultimate challenge proved not to be making the campuses reusable – the problem was the fact that the rest of New Orleans was still not functioning making it impossible for staff and students to practically live in New Orleans.

1. All of the K-12 schools were closed – Tulane managed to get its own small campus school formally chartered and opened this with over 1000 students.
2. Over 4000 staff and students did not have housing. Tulane’s response?? They bought a cruise ship!
3. Students needed to be re-recruited. 87% of students returne.d
4. There were no hospitals open:Tulane opened a street-corner clinic which has now been adopted as a model across New Orleans.

The major impact was a complete change in the attitude of the University in relation to the city of New Orleans itself and its responsibility as a major business and employer. All students are now required to do some form of public service whilst they are studying at Tulane

Tulane’s efforts are now being rewarded by unprecedented applications from students, excellent staff retention and strong research activities.

The negatives? Still having to sue insurance companies, still $200million out of pocket, still dealing with negative reactions to working with New Orleans.

Apologies for blogging off-topic, but this was too interesting not to capture – a real insight in to the true impact of Katrina.