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At the very core of it, there are different connection policies, for example, some countries do not allow connecteing institutions that are not financed by the governement, overseas institutions are classed as 'private' (e.g. Spain). In addition, there are political and technological barriers, for example, government restrictions in China (IpV6, firewall). There are also political barriers that we are not going to solve - such as the ban of institutes from abroad in Hungary - those should still be taken into consideration and possible barriers for collaboration should be removed. The main questions then are:
- Can we treat a foreign institution as a local education institution?
- How to work with country specific barriers?
- Reciprocal agreements?
- Can we come up with a global oriented policy?
Some of the work has been done in this area by Jisc - they have a Strategic Alliance with CERNET, which could potentially be expanded for other GÉANT members. Internet2 has agreements with CERNET and KISTI; GARR is work in progress.