Edugain Support
meta-data exchange
Interoperability IssuesAbout the Edugain Support
Centralized lookup for services provided in edutainment, should be made common knowledge.
Concept for Edugain support: Coordination of different actors, get everything together in one big picture (in case of security incident for example), work together with the different federations and entities, to resolve it together and inform everyone.
There will be cases where the end-user will need to be referred back to the federation, but the single user is not the partner this support is targeting. This support would mainly target and reach out directly to the research institutes and federations.
If a ticket cannot be resolved by the support, they would reach out to the federations, entities, try and get in touch with experts. The support team is being built right now, 7 people are already in.
The service will be an email address, where users can write to and create tickets. The service will be the coordination in order to solve those issues.
Discussion on how to make it better, what needs there are:
Federation representative** :** Sounds like a good idea, built a central point between the differences between federations. It would also be great to add some documentation and shared knowledge on issues:
Each federation operates quite differently to the others. Also provide documentation about these different tactics the federations use. If a lot of people run into the same problem, this knowledge can be shared across federations and maybe lead to action and change.
This sounds like a good opportunity to enhance communication between federations. Also increase interoperability in projects across federations. It might be good to have some people responsible exactly for this communication, create kind of a ticketing service.
Point that was brought up: Who gets information on what? What is confidential within this support-scope? Even if the resolved ticket is not transparent for all, a knowledge base can be drawn from this and made public for all.
Suggestion from an already existing system:
Differentiation between: Security relevant tickets and not security relevant tickets. The latter ones are public for all. This makes it easier, because users can check for resolved tickets first before opening a new one. This works better than an FAQ, because you can´t forget to update it. However this does raise questions of privacy, because you do not want to just make names public.
Not all problems can be solved, sometimes IdP do not even respond or want to solve a problem, or collaborate.
Summary :
This support will be an interesting experiment to see if it helps communication and problem solving, and hopefully uncover what the real problems are.
