Bill,
The InCommon Technical Advisory Committee has launched an effort to develop a document that presents the landscape of identity-related projects of particular relevance to the Research and Education (R&E) community, including information about their state, the relationships among them, and gaps among those relationships and between the capabilities they provide and what is needed by this community. This Identity Landscape document is intended to provide information as input to strategic decision making by those providing leadership to the identified projects and to promote increased coordination among them. It will be written with those audiences in mind, though we also expect it to be shared widely with the R&E public.
As a representative of the CAS project, your participation in this effort would be invaluable to us and, we hope, to you as well. In order to give you an idea of what we're looking for, I have included a quick set of questionnaire topics that we are using to collect basic information about each project, as well as answers to that questionnaire for the Grouper project, at the bottom of this message. As you can see, we are looking for very brief summary information, although we may ask to schedule a telephone conversation at a later date to fill in additional information. Simply replying to this note, editing your responses into the Questionnaire Topics below would be greatly appreciated. We could also schedule a telephone interview to go through the questionnaire and draft answers for your review, if that works better for you.
Please let me know if you are willing to participate, or could designate someone else. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. Thank you for your help.
David Walker
InCommon Technical Advisory Committee
dhwprof@gmail.com
Questionnaire Topics
Project Name
The name of the project.
Contacts
The people who provided this information.
Overview / Mission
A brief overview of the project's reason for being, what the products are, etc.
Goals / Roadmap
Specific goals the project has for the future. If available, also a time frame for achieving those goals.
Approach to Work
How priorities are set, the process for releasing deliverables, collaborative work style, expectations of members, etc.
Strategies for Sustainability
Strategies for funding, inclusion of new members, etc.
Relationships with Other Projects
Areas where there is observed interdependence or similarity with other projects.
Observed Gaps
Elements of the identity landscape that do not seem to exist, but are needed to achieve the project's goals.
Challenges
Potential roadblocks to achieving the project's goals.
More Information
URLs where further information about the project is available.
Notes
Miscellaneous notes that do not fit in the other categories.
Sample Grouper Response
DRAFT - Project Summary - Grouper - DRAFT
Project Name
Grouper Access Management System
Contacts
Tom Barton
Overview / Mission
Grouper is an open source toolkit for managing access using groups, roles, and permissions. It is designed to function as the core element of a common infrastructure for managing access information across integrated applications and repositories. Grouper combines multiple sources of group information, both automated and manual, in managing memberships and other group information in a Group Registry, a central information asset complementary to a site's Person Registry.
The Grouper project started in 2003 to address group management needs in higher education. In this context, higher education is distinguished from most other enterprises in the following ways:
It is very decentralized. Distributed management and delegation are very important.
Large numbers of identity sources must be accommodated.
Privilege is not tied closely to job titles.
Goals / Roadmap
Privilege management was added to Grouper in release 2. The next release is 2.2 in about six months. Highlights for that release include:
An administrative user interface to address the needs of beginning and intermediate users.
Support for any sized screen, down to mobile devices.
Greater orientation to a service catalog paradigm, including service tags and the concept of service administrators.
Integration for popular software like uPortal
Approach to Work
Grouper maintains two electronic mail lists, grouper-users and grouper-devs for communication. "Those who show up make the decisions," and they try hard to get people to show up. Decisions to move forward with new functionality require at least one adopter/partner who will use the functionality to assure the development is grounded in real needs.
Strategies for Sustainability
Grouper is an open source project with financial support from Internet2 for about 1.5 FTE spread over about 4 developers. Internet2 also supports conference calls and a scribe.
The sustainability proposition is the value Grouper brings; it's not necessarily financial. Grouper addresses a problem that people agree is good to work on.
Observed Gaps
Better capabilities to work with AD. Grouper can provision AD, but nothing more. Nobody's speaking up about this, but Gartner observed this in an evaluation of group management tools that otherwise rated Grouper well.
Closer work with CIFER. The sustainability and governance models don't always mesh well, making collaboration a challenge.
Relationships with Other Projects
Grouper has touched many other projects. For example,
Release 2 of Grouper inherited much of its functionality needs from the now defunct Signet project.
uPortal
Apereo / Jasig
Shibboleth
Kuali Rice
CIFER
Some engagement with Globus, although the fit wasn't very good.
Universities
University of West Bohemia contributed a POSIX UID/GID manager for Grouper
A consortium of 180 universities in central France with a shared instance of uPortal, managed by Grouper
SURFnet
Challenges
Organizational gaps, such as observed above for CIFER.
More Information
Grouper web site:http://www.internet2.edu/grouper/
Grouper Product Roadmap (https://spaces.internet2.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=14517754)
Notes