Dear colleagues, The InCommon Technical Advisory Committee wants your help bringing a “good practice” approach to research and education (R&E) identity federation. Would you please join me on Tuesday, May 7, at 1:00 PM UTC, to plan how we might accomplish this? We will rough out a regular meeting schedule and set some immediate goals for the Federation Readiness Check working group then. (See below/attached for meeting details.) A significant roadblock for new R&E community members is validating their identity provider (IdP) or service provider (SP) deployments. Current good federation practice involves an overwhelming variety of expectations, standards, entity categories, frameworks, profiles, and more. There exists no single, comprehensive resource for operational guidance and integration testing. What documentation or test resources exist are difficult to find even for experienced IAM professionals, are typically restricted to federation members, and are focused almost exclusively on IdPs. While the decentralized nature of R&E federation allows it to scale far beyond current commercial offerings, that same decentralization makes enacting meaningful change to IdP, SP, or federation operations seemingly impossible. A scorecard would be a powerful tool for change. Federation Readiness Check Working Group membership is open to the public. Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you think would be interested. Our initial meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, at 1:00 PM UTC via Zoom ( https://researchdata-us.zoom.us/j/81548511164?pwd=Uzh3UTXMdmldUWMK3pPWd85mr…). We will continue the discussion on the fedtestwg mailing list ( https://lists.incommon.org/sympa/info/fedtestwg) and the #inc-fed-ready-check-wg Slack channel (https://internet2.slack.com/). Working group materials will be posted to the Internet2 Confluence wiki ( https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/inctac/federation-readiness-check-wg ). Please note that as an Internet2 Activity, the Internet2 Intellectual Property Policy applies the working group ( https://internet2.edu/community/about-us/policies/internet2-intellectual-pr…). Please direct any Internet2 policy questions to legal(a)internet2.edu. Best wishes, Matthew -- Matthew X. Economou, Vice President of Engineering Research Data and Communication Technologies P.O. Box 81 Garrett Park, MD 20896 USA Office: +1 (301) 760-7383 x813 Mobile: +1 (513) 445-2323 Email: meconomou(a)researchdata.us