AARC Training and Outreach

Welcome to the AARC Training and Outreach Wiki.

Training Topics:

Task 1: Learning Needs Analysis

Task Leader organisation: GÉANT, Alessandra Scicchitano alessandra.scicchitano@geant.org

This task will identify the knowledge and skills gaps among target groups including libraries setting the competencies required for the project goals to be successful, and assessing the current knowledge and skills levels in order to prepare effective training to meet those needs. This will include setting clear guidelines and standards for all parties responsible for producing training materials and defining strategies. Furthermore this task will ensure that once the material is ready it is indeed consistent with the guidelines provided.

Task 2: Outreach and Dissemination

Task Leader organisation: GÉANT, Alessandra Scicchitano alessandra.scicchitano@geant.org

The objective of this task is to reach out targeted user communities and promote the use of federated access. The approach of the task will consider different aspects:

• Technical aspect: Various existing technical materials from NRENs, pioneer projects and communities will be evaluated, repackaged to convey a coherent message, and stored in a central repository for use by project   partners when talking to different user groups. As federations’ technical implementations and specific policy conditions differ, the results produced will be rather high-level. The material will be used to approach selected user communities to persuade them to join their national federation. The way in which these events will be organised will depend on the results of task 1.

• Legal aspect: There have been significant efforts to enable the exchange of user data within the federations in compliance with the law. National federations have all prepared guidelines for their users, explaining how federated access in fact preserves users’ privacy. At European level the eduGAIN team has invested resources to implement and deploy a Data protection Code of Conduct for Service Providers [CoC] and to promote the key messages of this approach. This task will work closely with national federations and the eduGAIN team to prepare materials for distributed training to targeted communities. This will help institutions utilise the potential of federated AAI for their users.

• Liaison with other projects/communities: Many existing projects and communities already focus on reaching out to user communities. Working closely with some of them will enable this task to have a bigger impact in terms of outreach, and will minimise duplication of effort across the whole spectrum. It is a component of this task to analyse and define target communities in order to ensure a multitude of community types can be reached by dissemination. The consortium partners’ existing relationships, networks, and communication channels will be used to maximise the true impact.

• General Dissemination about AARC results: All AARC results will be promoted via NA2.

Task 3: Training for Resource and Service Providers

Task Leader organisation: CSC, Manne Miettinen manne.miettinen@csc.fi

This task will enable e-Infrastructure providers to meet scientific service providers and, with the support of key people known to these providers, explain how to implement SAML-based services. This may result in the gathering of new requirements and recommendations with regards to implementation and operational costs.

Targeted service providers to implement federated access will initially include, but not be limited to:

• The European biological, and biomedical user community represented by ELIXIR-ESFRI. Considering the importance of federated authentication and access for sensitive data management and processing, this community provides a practically driven environment to develop and disseminate training materials to streamline uptake of federated AAI services within the biomedical community. The training material developed for this community will be used to derive guidelines for other service providers in other communities as well, allowing those communities to evolve the initial material following their requirements and needs.

• The European Grid Infrastructure. EGI represents a very diverse ecosystem that needs flexible authentication and authorisation mechanisms to support both big and structured collaboration and the users of the long tail of science. The training activities will be focused on dedicated sessions during the EGI main events, which are attended by a large number of EGI resource provider representatives and disseminate the technical solutions and policies produced by the project, to raise awareness and trust in the framework designed by the AARC and to foster the integration of such technologies. For the user communities the target of the training will be to expand the use of standard-based attribute provider services to manage the authorisation, and to promote the use of federated identities to access EGI.

• The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. The WLCG community makes use of a production infrastructure spanning hundreds of resource providers, serving a community of more than 10,000 physicists around the world with near real-time access to LHC data, and the power to process it. The current architecture relies on X.509, which involves a number of drawbacks. It would be highly beneficial both for the users whose organisations are participating in eduGAIN and for the LHC experiments to enable identity federation for the WLCG services. An objective of this task is to enable significantly easier and more convenient access to a number of WLCG services using federated identities issued by eduGAIN Identity Providers.

• Another series of activities address the needs of Digital Humanities e-infrastructure communities. DARIAH has established an AAI solution and a proven record of resources that have been made available for federated access. However, on a European scale, many valuable humanities resources are not yet accessible via federations. This task will identify and address further resource providers and their training needs in order to extend the number of available resources.

Task 4: Training on the Identity Providers

Task Leader organisation: GARR, Lalla Mantovani marialaura.mantovani@unimore.it

One of the goals of this project is to offer solutions for the easy creation of Identity Providers for targeted user groups and for libraries and other institutions willing to optimise the uptake of federated identities. This task will promote the solutions developed as part of the project. Part of the task is also to analyse the requirements of these institutions pertaining to all essential aspects of federated Identity Management. Because the type of solutions will depend on the results of JRA1 and SA1, a more detailed description of this work will only be possible at a later stage.

Background Documentation

• TERENA AAA Study and the relevant information on the wiki
• FIM4R Document
• AAI Workshop, held in Brussels in 2014
• RASMUS, Danish WAYF Federation's tool for showing value proposition for decision makers