Registrars are a Barrier to Collaboration: Truth or CIO Pretext? AACRAO Technology and Transfer Conference New Orleans, July 11, 2017

Join us in the bar…

Mark McConahay Associate Vice Provost and Registrar Indiana University Playing the role of Registrar KWM

Dennis Cromwell Works in IT @ Indiana University Playing the role of CIO today One spot above Brad Pitt on IMDB’s best looking actor list

Ann West AVP, Trust and Identity, Internet2 Playing the role of InCommon Community Engagement Rep

Ann, What’s InCommon About? Non-profit consortium of US higher ed, research, and their partner organizations Agree on standards, technologies, policies and practices to make it easy and more secure for faculty, staff and students to collaborate and do their work with colleagues at other places. Over 40 other “trust and identity federations” exist around the world and we work closely together to ensure integration so that faculty at IU can access collaborations and services where ever they are. A good analogy is the payment card industry. InCommon is like Mastercard helping the community to agree on the rules and putting them in place. Campuses identify individuals and give them online credentials for access like the banks. Service Providers allow access leveraging the authentication/identification done by the campuses.

The CIO Needs Help… Researchers and Scholars (and their students) can’t collaborate with national projects because of YOUR staff

A Researcher Needs Help Sally Feldman in Humanities has a NSF grant to work with the Modern Language Association and Hathi Trust Research Center. We’re all participating in this Trust Federation, but to enable this access, IU has to release some information about her at run-time (called attributes) so that MLA knows who she is and can give her appropriate access.

Sounds Great, But It’s Not The Registrars Problem… It affects Sally’s graduate and undergraduate students participating in the work. It affects the collaboration and projects because they must support two different approaches for faculty and students unless the Registrar agrees to the release. Faculty can use their IU credentials; Students have to set up separate accounts.

We Want To Support Collaboration, But This Is Concerning… Friends, do you all know about the InCommon Trust Federation? If so, what do you do for attribute release?

What Attributes Are Released? For qualifying Research and Scholarship services, campuses release: Name Email Address Affiliation (e.g. student@iu.edu) One non-reassigned Identifier for look up (either netid@iu.edu or pseudonymous identifier)

That Looks Like Directory Information To me… Yes, for many schools it is.

Wow, So We Release This To Any Service That Requests It? No The service must be in the InCommon Trust Federation and adhere to the Research and Scholarship policy. The user must first request access to the specific service.

Oh! That’s Disclosure… Yes! That’s right. But we need agreements/consents in place for that! Governing the InCommon Trust Federation is a participation agreement that has provisions for preserving privacy and respecting intellectual property. Every organization has to sign it. Trust Federations in other countries have this too.

This Requires Strong Authentication Too…who Does That? The organizations that identifies their users and issues electronic credentials to them also performs the authentication. In our case, IU is authenticating the user. This role is called identity provider.

If This Is So Important, Why Haven’t I Heard About This Before If This Is So Important, Why Haven’t I Heard About This Before? Why Haven’t The Faculty Brought This Up? If it doesn’t work, the projects do a work around to get the collaborator up and running quickly. Speed is important because they have very short windows for funding. So the person creates another account or worse, uses their google credentials that reveal where the researcher is going and inform the company’s profile on the person. Erodes privacy, security and usability. We don’t expect faculty to understand the details of how the network works or how access is handled on campus.

What About Students That Have Suppressed Disclosure Rights Under FERPA? We can build in the ability to block releasing attributes for students wishing to restrict disclosure.

Wouldn’t This Be Better To Get The Student To Consent To The Release Of Each Attribute? Consent to release all or none of the attributes is included in the technology now. Future plans include more granular release.

Next Steps Find out if your school is an InCommon Participant. Have a discussion about how you approach Research and Scholarship in the Trust Federation. Support this policy Add the release to the annual disclosure for students. Join a task force to provide guidance on this issue to your colleagues.

Thank You! Dennis Cromwell, dcromwel@iu.edu Mark McConahay, mcconaha@indiana.edu Ann West, awest@internet2.edu