Advanced CAMP: Scaling Secure Collaboration

Advanced CAMP workshops bring together experts from across the research and education community to focus on a cutting-edge topic related to identity and access management. The intent is to make shared progress in understanding difficult issues, in order to generate projects to solve problems in the topic area. Workshop participants benefit from a high level of participation and interaction, and are expected to come to the workshop with opinions and proposals. This year's topic is scaling secure collaboration.

The daily stuff of research and education is collaboration: writing documents, giving and taking courses, and analyzing research data, as well as a vast number of other collaborative pursuits. Increasingly, these activities are supported by collaborative software applications, from the familiar (e-mail lists, learning management systems) to the relatively new (wikis and desktop videoconferencing) to the esoteric (advanced scientific instruments). A single collaboration can benefit from many software tools. Collaborations often cross institutional, national, and academic/discipline boundaries and involve large, dynamic, self-identifying groups of people. Setting up access to applications and resources for a diverse user group can be a time-consuming, confusing, and insecure task, even when individual applications are sophisticated. Federating technologies such as SAML and Shibboleth promise to address some of the problems, but many more remain.

The focus of the 2007 Advanced CAMP will be on identity and access management services such as federated authentication, group and privilege management, and integration of these services into applications and application suites. Application technologies of interest include common Web/browser-accessible services, non-Web application protocols such as instant messaging and calendaring, and real-time technologies such as audio and videoconferencing.

Sessions will cover the following key questions:

• What collaboration scenarios are important to research and education now and in the near future?
• What are the requirements on collaborative applications and platforms to support the range of collaboration scenarios?
• What management processes are needed to support access, and who will administer them?
• What opportunities and obstacles exist in connecting institutional Identity Management processes to collaboration-centric processes?
• Is there value in developing a standard collaboration platform or standardized features across platforms?
• What is the appropriate role for Internet-scale consumer-oriented services in supporting academic collaborations?

Additional material regarding the workshop topic can be found at the workshop wiki at https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/ACAMPCollab/.

Attendees should have an in-depth knowledge of and experience with implementing identity management and/or managing or developing large collaborative applications or platforms. Campus IT strategists, software architects, and those in related leadership roles will derive the most value from these sessions.

Advanced CAMP is sponsored by the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative-Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies (NMI-EDIT) Consortium: Internet2 and EDUCAUSE. Additional support was provided by the National Science Foundation OCI-0330626. For information about NMI-EDIT and participation in the NSF Middleware Initiative, see www.nmi-edit.org.