TTC minutes - 2015-02-10

Participants: Michael Enrico (ME), Peter Schober (PSc), Peter Szegedi (PSz), Vincente Goyanes (VG), Alessandra Scicchitano (AS), Rob Evans (RE), Laura Durnford (LD), Licia Florio (LF), Yannis Mitsos (YM), Valentino Cavalli (VC), Valter Nordh (VN), David Groep (DG), Brook Schofield (BS), Nicole Harris (NH), John Dyer (JD)

Notes: Sigita Jurkynaite (SJ)

Apologies: None

1. Welcome and agreement of agenda

VN welcomed the participants and opened the meeting. Michael Enrico (GÉANT Association, Cambridge) was present for the first time and all members introduced themselves with a brief description of their roles and responsibilities.

The agenda was approved.

2. Approval of Minutes

The members of the TTC approved the minutes of the 5^th of November 2014 via e-mail after the meeting.

 https://wiki.terena.org/display/TTC/TTC+minutes+-+2014-11-05

3. Review of Outstanding Action Points

 3. Secretariat reports

3.1. TF-MNM re-chartering – Nicole Harris

NH reported that TF-MNM came up for re-chartering in September 2014 and presented the ToR for approval of TTC.

NH noted that the main focus was placed on setting achievable goals, benefiting the whole community – for that several new tasks had to be added and more concrete deliverables set. NH also noted that strong reporting ties need to be implemented. NH explained that there is a wish, expressed by the community, for TF-MNM to function as a global eduroam forum. This might duplicate the function of eduroam Steering Group, although only Europeans can participate in that group. According to NH, this will be explored and recommendations made.

NH also informed the TTC that nobody was named to lead any particular areas yet, but there are a few names in mind.

TTC approved the ToR. Re-approval due in September 2016.

3.2. TF-WebRTC report – Peter Szegedi

PSz reported on the first TF-WebRTC meeting that was organized in December. The meeting was very successful with more than 35 attendees participating in person and 17 via VC - good interest, including participants from the industry.

TF-WebRTC is not focused on the technology itself, but the use of technology. One of the goals is to identify the appropriate tools to be used once the funding is available.

Two main goals at the moment:

• Create an open forum - industry and NREN
• Focus the activity to use the GÉANT funding in a good way

PSz noted that the next meeting will be held in April in Budapest, already attracted sufficient interest.

3.3. OER Pilot delivery – Peter Szegedi

PSz reported that the OER portal pilot project is now successfully finished. Major objectives were achieved - back-end (harvesting and aggregation), 8 repositories connected to the aggregation service, out of more than 22 000 learning items available, more than 12 000 objects were filtered and made available on the portal. Front-end pilot was developed, including subject fields, most viewed-recent viewed, advanced search functionality, etc. - linking together materials that previously could not physically be linked together. Google search will lead to this portal.

PSz noted that a position paper “NREN Community Statement on Open Education” was published.

Based on the KPIs, most targets achieved and exceeded, except for the connection with global OER initiatives. Real project costs do not exceed the estimated costs.

Next steps: OER in T3 of SA8 in GN4, demo at the Symposium and TNC15.

VN inquired about the means of communications to be used to disseminate information about the OER. PSz informed that there was someone working on the PR message throughout the project, some materials are already prepared and will be used. LD added that a PeaR news item will come out next week.

3.4. REFEDS update – Nicole Harris and Licia Florio

NH and LF reported on REFEDS, which is a sponsored activity, paid for by some of the participants.

NH noted that there is an annual work plan, consisting of short term goals and indicated some of the main points of the Annual Report of 2014:

• Setting out a baseline level of assurance in federations, common ground in identity federations. Apparently, the issue is not so much related to the policy issues, but operational practices instead – tried to address that;
• To satisfy the growing need to categorize a lot of metadata, entity categories are used for tagging (8000 categories);
• Working on the Metadata Query Protocol - federations dealing with a lot of data need better tools and specifications to be able to manage metadata;
• Working with the certified group – Security Incident Response within identity federations;
• SCHAC (SCHema for Academia) - LF sent slides around with main objectives and other information; (https://wiki.refeds.org/display/STAN/SCHAC)
• REFEDS documents published via RFC process - successful moving that forward, will continue to increase that as the main publication
• Working in specialist working groups, focus groups
• Working on core services

LF noted that the sponsorship structure of REFEDS is changing, partially because sponsors felt that sponsorship was handled unprofessionally. For that reason, the process had to be formalized. REFEDS remains an open group and it is not necessary to contribute financially to be part of it. However, 4 categories of sponsorship are introduced. Sponsors will need to be more involved in the preparation of the yearly plan, provide suggestions.

NH also noted that a new plan is in place for this year.

3.5. AARC – Licia Florio

LF reported on AARC (Authentication and Authorization for Research and Collaboration) - a two year project, funding for which (€3M) has recently been granted by the EC. 19 funded partner organizations will contribute to AARC. At the moment the project is in the grant preparation phase, some details need to be improved. LF noted that AARC is complementary to GÉANT - it involves not only NRENs, but also libraries and other organizations and institutions. There are 5 work packages:

• Management
• Training and Outreach
• Analysis of existing e-Infrastructures
• Policy
• Pilots

It is expected that if all required documentation will be signed in time, the project will start on May 1, 2015.

3.6. MAGIC – Brook Schofield

BS reported on MAGIC - the successor to the successful ELCIRA project (http://elcira.eu) which will expand its geographic coverage during its 2015-2017 lifetime with €1.4M in funding across 20 global partners to support eduroam, Federated Identity and eduGAIN (WP2), Cloud Provisioning and GroupWare (WP3), Real-Time Collaboration services such as SIP, NRENum.net and WebRTC (WP4) and supporting Global Science Communities (WP5).

3.7. E4ERA – John Dyer

JD reported that E4ERA bid for the EC funding was not successful.  The main idea of the project was bringing together e-Infrastructures providers with the users. JD noted that there is a meeting scheduled to discuss how to proceed and whether there is a way to go on with the project in some other way.

3.8. TF-MSP Joined procurement – John Dyer

JD reported that at the moment, much procurement is done individually, although bringing them together would give a larger bargaining power. To discuss a possibility of joined procurements a meeting is being organized in March in Amsterdam. It will be an opened meeting, everyone is welcome to attend – it will be announced in PeaR next week. Also, a wiki page supporting this activity is currently being created - information will be made available for everyone from the community (access will be given upon request).

4. Initial set of topics for the TAC discussion at TNC15

VN initiated a discussion to identify a set of initial topics for the TAC discussion at TNC15 so that the agenda would be drafted and the right speakers identified and invited on time. NH noted that the TAC topics should reflect the main theme of the TNC (connected communities) and that it is important not to hesitate to approach anyone to be the main speaker. In reaction to PSc suggestion that a feedback cycle from previous meetings should be introduced, VN commented that is has been done, but should be reinforced.

VN noted the areas that will be most relevant in the coming 3 years: changing the structure of the backbone, improving communication with our shareholders (CEOs), and services - new introduced, but none replaced.

 During the discussion, a set of topics was collected:

• joint procurement, input from the technical managers
• inconsistency of service offerings in different countries - not all the services are available in all the countries
• availability and harmonization of service availability across providers - innovation at the edge
• engagement with the future internet style projects - whatever can be discussed within the TAC framework (technical issues)
• lack of middleware activities other than identity
• transfer of confidential data over the network (information security management)
• role of SDN
• OSS integration
• the role of NRENs in research data management (repositories for research data)
• connectivity problem on the boarders of Europe – impact on the use of MOOCs
• "burn all passwords" (activity U2F)
• "where is the voice of the campus?"
• "do you know how to be an NREN?"

Action: It was agreed to have a video conference meeting on March 9, 2015 (14:00 – 16:00) to discuss the topics for the TAC session at TNC15 again, in preparation for which the TTC members will reconsider the list and consult other members of their organization.

5. Greenhouse project – Licia Florio and Nicole Harris

LF reported that the Greenhouse activity has been started – a plan has been set and the concept is ready to be moved forward. A short report, including a high plan, can be found online (https://wiki.terena.org/display/GREEN/Greenhouse+Home). At the beginning, the most important tasks were shaping the concept (what is Greenhouse), looking into the requirements of the projects in order to see whether there are common requirements that can be addressed, and looking into existing models, since there are groups that already offer something similar.

NH noted that it has been recognized that different products and projects have different needs from a software conservancy organization like the Greenhouse. Given that, product needs assessment has been initiated, for which different projects were asked to provide data. Once the data is in, it will be possible to analyses the information and decide whether it is feasible to further implement this project. 

NH also noted that it is important to identify the right approach – there is a need to better understand what to focus on, looking at the projects that are not funded by the GÉANT Project, to have something that is community driven as a starting point.

6. European Workshop on Trust and Identity – Nicole Harris

NH reported that since the TF-EMC2 activity finished last year, there were talks about the need to keep those discussions going elsewhere. One of the platforms is the European Workshop on Trust and Identity (http://identityworkshop.eu/) - open space type meeting, coordinated by Rainer Hörbe, which brought in people from outside of the community. NH noted that until now there were a lot of meetings that were left to Rainer to run. However, there is a need to have this process more formalized so that GÉANT in collaboration with Rainer could coordinate those meetings better, for example, GÉANT Amsterdam could run the registration and website.

TTC strongly supported the idea and encouraged further collaboration.

7. TTC Member updates

7.1. “HE Media Services” by Vincente Goyanes

VG reported on the new higher education media services, creation of which is dictated by rapidly changing e-learning needs. Higher education media services are applicable in both synchronous and asynchronous e-learning practices, video online has become the best knowledge dissemination tool, and the demand is ever growing. VN provided definitions of the main concepts (MOOCs, SPOCs, etc.), presented the biggest existing providers (it is apparent that Europe is lagging behind the US), deployment options and educational video production solutions based on Opensource software (Automatic lecture capture, learning pills production, conferences recording and streaming with multi-stream solutions, etc).

VG noted that it is becoming urgent for the NRENs to act in response of the growing need for higher education media services – separate NRENs are possibly doing something on their own, but a unified approach is necessary. PSz responded that the MOOC area is covered in the OER Position Paper - if NRENs can produce good quality MOOCs, universities could use it. However, this area required too much effort previously and ended up being a top-down approach due to the lack of effort from the community on these type of projects. VN suggested that it might be useful to initiate a BoF. VC added that perhaps someone else (not PSz) from GÉANT could take over this task.

It was decided to leave this question up to the staff of GÉANT Association Amsterdam to decide whether and how to proceed further.

8. AOB

The date for the next TTC meeting – TBC.

VN closed the meeting.

9. Summary of New and Open action points

Minutes

20150210-TTC-notes-edit.docx