Invitation to Join the Shibboleth Consortium

The Shibboleth team is inviting interested parties and federations to join the Shibboleth Consortium, and help shape and sustain the future of the Shibboleth project.

A copy of this letter and a supporting pdf are available on the Shibboleth wiki, suitable for printing and sharing internally within your organization.

The Shibboleth software is relied on by thousands of organizations worldwide to provide single sign-on solutions for their users. Since 2001, Shibboleth has become the software of choice for education and research institutions, governments and commercial companies looking to implement SAML.

The Shibboleth Consortium was formed in 2010 by the three primary investors in Shibboleth – Internet2 in the US, JISC in the UK, and SWITCH in Switzerland to provide a sustainable future for Shibboleth. The Consortium currently provides funding to support the technical infrastructure of the project as well as the core Shibboleth developers, now located in several countries.

The Shibboleth developers have always provided a great deal of support to users and extension developers through our mailing lists. However, providing this support, performing ongoing maintenance for existing products and participating in relevant standards bodies means those same people have little time to implement new features requested by the community. A primary aim for the Consortium in 2012/2013 is to fund additional developers and decrease the delivery time for customer requested features.

Today we are inviting organizations interested in the future of Shibboleth to visit the new project website at www.shibboleth.net, read about the Consortium and support the project through one of the membership models or via a donation. Membership has three tiers depending on organizational size, costing £4000, £20,000 and £40,000. Recognizing the size of this commitment, we welcome donations of any sort or size to help us sustain this vital open source project.

A large number of organizations are now critically dependent on the Shibboleth software. Please help us to ensure its long-term future.