01 - DI Whitepaper

Resources:

Underlying assumptions

(Inspiration taken from Work Item discussion and further elaborated)

• What is the essence of DI and why bother?
  • cross-sectorial standards
  • user-centrism - not just within one ecosystem
  • changing roles for IdPs
• DI technology could in principle be deployed vertically integrated on a per ecosystem basis. But we are primarily interested in deploying DI technology with a strong horizontal integration to achieve interoperation with other ecosystems.
  
  • The "why":
    • GÉANT together with the NREN community are running a successful identity inter-federation for almost two decades now. This approach works very well for use cases fully accommodated in our "siloed" GÉANT/NREN ecosystem. DI technology promises to overcome the ecosystem barrier and this is the main motivation for our ecosystem to engage in adopting DI technology.
    • We think horizontal integration is bringing more benefit short term
  • Risks associated with this approach: 
  • elaborate on the notion of "ecosystem":
  • what is our "ecosystem":
  • which borders are we crossing:
    • national: we are doing already, this is what we are doing already in identity federations for years.
    • regional: This again, we are doing already with our globally scaling eduGAIN federation. The EU-boundaries might become more important with advances of eIDASv2. We want to continue to work on the global scale nevertheless.
    • sectorial: This is rather novel for our ecosystem. We recognise opportunities for our ecosystem in the emerging DI ecosystems, as they might make crossing sectorial borders much simpler for everybody (if successful)
• We assume that the EU efforts around eIDASv2/EBSI/EUDI Wallet and similar efforts elsewhere will be a focal point in driving DI technology fostering such horizontal integration in the emerging global DI ecosystem
• We must be aware that DI technology is not yet mature and largely untested in big scale deployments. Success is not a guarantee. We have to consider all of those potential outcomes:
  • The DI ecosystems will be stepwise implemented and are developing towards a global DI ecosystem. 
  • The DI technology is not delivering on its promises and neither DI ecosystems nor a global DI ecosystem is emerging from it.
  • The DI global ecosystem (or at least to some extent) is established but does not develop in a way delivering value to our ecosystem.
• We will elaborate all of these outcomes and include scenarios. When judging outcomes, we do this considering our core values:
  • openness: we want to build our solutions on open standards with no artificial barriers for entry
  • inclusiveness: the openness on technical level gets extended on the governance level
  • global scale: education and research processes are often global in nature. National and regional solutions are often not good enough.
  • trust: preserve and maintain the trust fabric established between GÉANT, the NRENS and their constituencies 
  • authority: we want to keep authority (standards, governance etc.) on our core processes
    • The "why" needs more thought
• We are primarily interested in defining actions we can take as NREN or its umbrella organisation GÉANT
• We assume that our existing ecosystem will be around for quite some time to come and co-exist with the emerging DI ecosystem. 
• We have 20+ years of experience and assume leadership in implementing cross-sectorial solutions fit for the purpose.
  • We can build upon our experience in building, running and governing the identity inter-federation for the international research and education community.
  • We filled an empty space and assumed authority over many aspects, like identifiers and schemas, and were thus able to drive standardisation.
  • But by now, we are no longer "on our own", but want to continue to make use of the experience gained over the years and expand into terrain where we do not have authority over many aspects, like diploma and other educational credentials, or to carry membership and entitlements potentially applying standards and procedures governed elsewhere. We might not be able to exercise the same level of authority as we used to, but still can profit from our experience gained.
  • We see this as a natural evolution and we want to be part of it.
• give tangible example of user stories fitting in our community
  • student mobility use cases
  • research: applying for grants, sharing data, ...
  • x-sectorial use case: applying for a job, getting in professional registers
• What are we going to do now

Definitions

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• Marina Adomeit How do we wrap this content into a nice storyline? → propose a TOC by 2.2.2024