My Presentation can be downloaded from the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting site as a PDF .

My opening comments are included in my PDF.

George Brett’s opening comments:

1. The recent Wizards Meeting used wiki’s for real-time posting of notes and documents. This was a shift from the usual – mailing list and weekly phone call.
1. Ineternet2 has many communities of interest. Those communities can aggregate to form larger communities. You can imagine a vin diagram of nested and overlapping circles that represents these groups.
1. He will be listening to see what these people think about these topics and to look for direction for Internet2’s collaboration and communication.

JPR’s Demo of MyVOCS.

Discussion Portion of the Meeting

Internet2 currently has about 15,000 Sympa email users. Internet2’s 15,000 email addresses may not represent 15,000 users. It represents 15K identities. Shibboleth could push us all to one identity but not necessarily so. You could have one identity for each IdP that you belong to.

Balance the political need to control and organize information vs. personal desire and choices for how to handle information. Pushing information out for the use of the masses vs. controlling information because of privacy fears.

What is the learning curve for new users using these tools? For the Folksonomy stuff it is pretty low and simple. For MyVOCS, people get hung up on the shibboleth portion.

Jill – hoping to learn what other open source collaboration tools people are interested in using. John-Paul – this is much like our desktop analogy. You find new tools you like. By having this common identity management framework, you can easily add new tools.

What about delegated administration? The goal is push the administration out. The MyVOCS space is pretty wide open. Anyone can create a new VO and become the new administrator for that VO. They have all of the capabilities as an administrator.

Can the average user do that or do the tools need to be simplified? Depends on what tools they have used before. Jump in and start using these tools.

Internet2 is a big user of Sympa. If we wanted to delegate this out to chair of a working group. Can these chairs handle the delegation of rights (read/write by group, readable by everyone, etc)? What you need to know is how to handle administration of Sympa. All of the rights flow from Sympa out to the other tools.

Sympa developers are active in the MList project. The MList follows this meeting. We can take is GUI and functional issues back to the developers if we need to.

Part of this is a training issue also. These chairs need to understand the space and the best use of these tools.

There is an issue of how to mailing list attributes (members can post but everyone can read archives) translate to other tools (what happens in the wiki)? That is where the tool provider/configurer must make intelligent decision. They chose Drupal because it understands assertions but the wiki doesn’t.

Issue of email address as an identifier. In MyVOCS it is NetID@IdentityProvider. Sympa is moving towards netid@idp also.