Collaboration & InCommon EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference March 21, 2005 Carrie E. Regenstein UW-Madison

2 Defining Collaboration  MS Word dictionary #1: The act of working together with one or more people in order to achieve something  MS Word thesaurus: Teamwork, partnership, group effort, association, alliance, relationship, cooperation

3 Defining Collaboration and Trust  MS Word dictionary #2: The betrayal of others by working with an enemy, especially an occupying force  “Collaboration” means that some folks are included… and others are not That’s OK: identity management…. Identification, authentication, authorization, e-business, etc.  “Who ya gonna trust?”  InCommon Trust among institutions Trust between institutions and resources providers

4 IT contributes to Higher Ed’s changing culture  Digital Learning Cultures in the Information Landscape; Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI); Keynote at Syllabus2004 Conference The fundamental nature of scholarly practice and scholarly communication is changing. Institutional repositories represent a place to store and manage…material; to make it be “not at risk” in the sense of keeping it alive and accessible. We are in a very different information landscape today…where we are challenged to break down the walls of siloed information services and siloed information and data resources.  Focus on learning management systems and the relationship to scholarly communication environments. Raises issues concerning inter-institutional access to course materials and other content.

5 New Technology and Faculty Culture  Cornell University’s Faculty E-Scholarship Projects: Goal of the Grants Program: Cornell University Library invites proposals from Cornell faculty to transform unique research and teaching materials into digital collections that are searchable and accessible over the Web. The goal of the grants program is to support collaborative and creative use of resources through the creation of digital content of enduring value to the Cornell community and scholarship at large The emphasis is on building a library of resources to support a range of scholarly activities at Cornell rather than creating teaching applications or custom-designed web sites for a specific course. The digital collections created through this grants program will become a part of Cornell University Library's digital library and made available to the world. digital library

6 New Technology and Student Culture  Your Source for online Music at Penn State It’s here and it’s legal, and now everyone gets it Napster’s acceptance of Shibboleth Napster’s acceptance of Penn State’s say so

7 On the Internet, you may have to admit you’re a dog

8 InCommon can help make sharing protected online resources easier  InCommon is… a formal federation of organizations focused on creating a common framework for trust in support of research and education… whose purpose is to facilitate collaboration through the sharing of protected resources, by means of an agreed-upon, common trust fabric.  The InCommon federation is intended to support production-level end- user access to protected resources by providing the means to allow organizations to make effective decisions about sharing resources, based upon the attributes presented by a requester.  Risk and Trust between resource and credential providers will drive technology and policies

9 Collaboration and Technology  Courtesy of  From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) Shibboleth \Shib"bo*leth\, n. [Heb. shibb[=o] leth an ear of corn, or a stream, a flood.] 1. A word which was made the criterion by which to distinguish the Ephramites from the Gileadites. The Ephraimites, not being able to pronounce sh, called the word sibboleth. See -- Judges xii. Without reprieve, adjudged to death, For want of well pronouncing shibboleth. -- Milton. Also in an extended sense. The th, with its twofold value, is... the shibboleth of foreigners. -- Earle. 2. Hence, the criterion, test, or watchword of a party; a party cry or pet phrase. 

10 Attributes: brown, four-legged, chair-sitting mammal

11 Collaboration & Technology: Shibboleth v  Open-source, standards-based, privacy-preserving federating software  Accelerating deployment globally: InCommon, NSDL, SWITCH, Finland, Netherlands, United Kingdom (three), Australia, InQueue, League of Federations  Commercial information providers in production: Elsevier Science Direct, OCLC, etc.  Service Provider component works with Apache(1.3 and 2.0) and IIS  Identity Provider component is Java-based for a variety of platforms  Integration with portals, p2p, and Grid implementations  Working on underlying Attribute Authority GUI and resource protection  SAML v2.0 compliant, interoperable with Liberty Alliance and Microsoft AD-Federated Services (target timeline is Q1 2006)  Growing international development interest providing resource manager tools, list software, etc. 

12 Shibboleth: Authorization, Ease of Use, Privacy Shibb-enabled access

13 Shibb-enabled Service Providers  ArtSTOR  Blackboard (example)example  CSA  Darwin Streaming Server  eAcademy  EBSCO Publishing  Elsevier ScienceDirect  ExLibris - SFX  Fedora  Gale  Higher Markets  JSTOR  Napster  NSDL  OCLC  OLAT  Ovid Technologies Inc.  Proquest Information and Learning  SYMPA  TWiki  Useful Utilities - EZproxy  Web Assign  WebCT  Zope4Edu

14 Where our culture is taking us : Croquet — htttp://  "The Croquet Project ( is a joint development effort between the University of Wisconsin's Division of Information Technology and the University of Minnesota's Office of Information Technology to develop an advanced open-source toolset for creating 3D simulations and for delivering multi-user online virtual environments that support deep collaborative learning and instruction. Croquet's architecture offers a scalable, persistent, and extensible interface to network-delivered educational resources and tools for knowledge management and social presence. Through Croquet, educators and instructional designers will be able to use the client reference implementation’s authentication and interaction APIs to create feature-rich, client applications. Educational researchers will benefit from the assessment capabilities afforded by the Croquet architecture’s broad extensibility."

15 InCommon, LLC Management  Governance Steering Committee – Carrie Regenstein - chair (Wisconsin- Madison), Jerry Campbell, (USC), Lev Gonick (CWRU), Clair Goldsmith (Texas System), Mark Luker (EDUCAUSE),Tracy Mitrano (Cornell), Susan Perry (Mellon), Mike Teets, (OCLC), David Yakimischak (JSTOR) Internet2 Member – Ken Klingenstein  Operations – Internet2 InCommon Certificate Authority –Issuing the enterprise certificate signing keys Identity proofing the enterprise (Registry Authority) Metadata and Certificate submission User Interface Hosting the WAYF (Where Are You From) interface Supporting campuses in posting their policies

16 InCommon Pilot  11 Phase One participants Cornell University Dartmouth College Elsevier The Ohio State University Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Penn State University at Buffalo (SUNY) University of California, Irvine University of California, San Diego University of Rochester University of Washington

17 InCommon  Information and participation today The InCommon federation allows Higher Ed institutions to share information and resources between themselves and their business partners in a trusted, standardized fashion that protects privacy, respects copyright, and fosters collaboration and innovation. It provides the trust framework for organizations to make decisions about user access to protected resources based on privacy-preserving attributes presented by the user’s home institution.  InCommon, some time from now Established with several hundred participants Multi-layered strength-of-trust threads among participants Working with state and/or regional federations “Peering” with national federations in other countries “Gateways” with commercial federations And it’s all possible in higher education’s culture of technology, collaboration, and challenge!