I've just come from an (internal) meeting on "our shibboleth
position", with Library and IT people involved. It appears that we
are all sharing the same frustrations. I feel obliged to write them down.

More importantly, I suspect that virtually every other University
in the country is having similar meetings, with similarly depressing
outcomes.


This morning, I was forwarded a message from Mark Williams at JISC, via 
the RSC.

It says: (apologies for selective quoting - I'm endeavouring to keep this 
message as short as possible. I do not believe I have quoted out of context)


>> A number of institutions have indicated that they have felt pressure
>> from Eduserv to enter into deals by the end of May. Can we get the
>> message out, that they should feel no requirement to rush into signing
>> up to anything prior to the July 31st funding cut off date.

While this is undoubtedly good advice in principle, I would be a
little concerned about hanging back until the very last minute.
It's only good advice if you are the only institution to take it!
If a large number of institutions were to "sign up" on the very
last day, who knows how long it would take Eduserv to process these
applications. My experience is that software & services agreements
of this type can easily take 6-8 weeks to put in place. If you were
to "sign" on 31 July, would you still have service on 1st August?

>> The status of publishers membership of the
>> UK Federation and Shibboleth compliance is becoming clearer everyday

Is it? It's certainly not becoming clearer to us! Even the list of
suppliers compliance levels which we were given by JISC is confusing
and contradictory.

Is there a definitive public list of service providers who have (a)
committed to be shib-compliant by midsummer and (b) who have
categorically stated that they will not be compliant by this time?
Note that this list is NOT the same as simply looking at the
membership of UKfederation.

This is an area where we should be sharing experiences.

I get the feeling that there is still a certain amount of brinksmanship
going on - a game of "chicken", in which there will be no clear-cut
winners or losers.


So, at a practical level, how can we move matters forward? My own
feeling is that for too long the community has regarded the "shib
problem" as being largely a technical one. It's now clear that this
isn't the case - the technology isn't a problem. The difficulties
are procedural, commercial and political.

To me, it appears that the concerted pressure that the community
was supposed to be applying to individual suppliers to hasten their
migration towards federated access just isn't happening. The word
from JISC is for individual institutions - the customers - to apply
such commercial pressure, but the feeling from the community is
that JISC should be the ones doing the pushing. I don't know who is right.

But everyone seems to think that it's Someone Else's Job. Who is taking 
responsibility?


Does anyone have any comments on what I've said? Am I, and my
colleagues, completely out of step? Or are you all as confused and
concerned as us?

At the end of the day, I'm not going to lose too much sleep over
this - it's another of those "Someone Else's Problems". At first I
thought my job was the difficult bit - delivering the tools (an
IdP) which are necessary at our end. But it's now clear that that
was the easy task; the real difficulties have just begun, and it's
the library people, not IT, who will have the most difficult task
over the coming months.

Bruce.
--
Bruce Rodger                      [log in to unmask] 
Network Manager, IT Services      |http://www.strath.ac.uk/IT/People/bruce.html
The University of Strathclyde     | +44 (0)141 548 3300
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