Page History

...

During this meeting the challenges, identified at the previous workshop were addressed. The aim of the meeting was also to identify more NRENs that would benefit from a collaborative approach and guidance from the wider NREN community. The list of participants can be found here.

TNE: Context and Session Objectives 

Esther Wilkinson, Jisc

At the beginning of the session, Esther defined TNE, briefly introducing to what TNE is

...

Ideas for moving forward: NRENs should work together in consolidating the information available into something that can be used to move towards a common way of treating the data, perhaps involving some other national and international organisations and sharing the best practice examples. 

Global TNE policies

Alexander van den Hil, SURFnet

Alexander outlined the TNE issues related to the different policies and demonstrated the need to moving to a position where we all treat the TNE customers the same. 

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.                                                                                                                                                                    

Technical Barriers

William Wan, CERNET

One other 'Big Issue' that needs to be taken into consideration when talking about TNE is technical barriers. William grouped those digital divides into 4 main groups:

Suggested services that need to be develped to address the challenges are end-to-end support and 24/7 service desks.

Tools, toolkits and resources

Esther Wilkinson, Jisc

The main tasks of this workstream are to

• identify tools and resources already in existance, 
• to develop a suite of tools and resources
• and to understand requirements of tools and resources to more directly support education institutions or policy stakeholders in the NREN country

to enable NRENs to support TNE, individually and globally and enable accesability.

Esther presented a few examples of existing tools and information sharing platforms that can be used or adopted by NRENs, such as:

• GÉANT Interactive Connectivity Map, 
• UK (Jisc) TNE Tech Special Interest Group, connecting 23 higher education institutions, 
• Jisc TNE Toolkit (checklists for NRENs and education institutions supporting TNE), 
• the blog of case studies In the Field, 
• TNE registration form, used by Jisc and HEAnet
• GÉANT SIG-TNE wiki page

A couple of areas that this group could work on to add onto the abovementioned resources are collecting and publishing country specific info and writing up more success stories for the 'In the Field' blog and other media.

Next steps

• Steering Committee to develop SIG-TNE Workplan based on todays discussions and share on SIG Wiki
• Survey SIG-TNE members on Workplan contents and call for contributors
• Plan and communicate next meetings of SIG-TNE every six months  (on or around November 2017, then TNC18)
• Continue to develop SIG-TNE Wiki site resources