Presence and IntComm WG

[Deke Kassabian <>]

Folks,

I know we have an upcoming call this Thursday.  I'm hoping we can 
finish up or at least continue the discussion we started two Thursdays 
ago when Peter Saint-Andre and Michael Gettes joined the call to help 
us discuss goals and approaches to federation of PIC.edu 
implementations on member campuses.

Here's where I think we are...

The major goals when considering federations was, I think, identity 
assurance in an inter-institutional way, and IM spam (spim) avoidance.

The majority of those expressing an opinion, notably including Rodney 
McDuff (before the call), Peter Saint-Andre and Michael Gettes all 
appear to be recommending a very "low hurdle" for a variety of good 
reasons.  I think I'm coming around to this notion.  If PIC.edu had 
guidelines to those deploying, advice and best practices, perhaps we 
could avoid technical barriers to entry that will only tend to 
frustrate users and organizations and accomplish little.

I think the goals are good goals.  I guess I'm concerned that if 
there's no hurdle at all and we want to create one or raise the bar a 
bit later we'll have trouble doing so.  That is, those who deployed 
PIC.edu with us in the early days but are unable or unwilling to get 
slightly more strict in terms of user authentication, chasing 
misbehaving users, or (much later) inter-institutional 
server-to-server authentication will make it harder for us to achieve 
this higher level without considering "kicking folks out" of PIC.edu.

Can we take that up in Thursday's discussion?

-------
Deke Kassabian,  Senior Technology Director
Information Systems and Computing, University of Pennsylvania
http://kassabian.org/deke/  --  
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