Shibboleth Technical Support

[Cantor, Scott]

On 8/22/17, 6:46 PM, "users on behalf of Rhian Resnick" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of rresnick at fau.edu> wrote:

> This evoked some discussion this evening at our institution. 

It's certainly intended to.

> How does this affect members of Internet2 and InCommon?

That's really up to both Internet2 and its members, and Internet2 is a board member and its representatives were fully aware of (and endorsed) both the change and the timing of the public announcement, which is a couple of months after it was shared with all the members.
 
> Are you asking our institutions to become Academic Members of the Shibboleth Consortium or are we covered by our
> Internet2/InCommon membership? 

As the FAQ I wrote and that Nate linked to says, there is no connection between membership in InCommon and in the Consortium or in any similar situations worldwide, so this isn't singling anybody out. 

The Board isn't formally asking anybody to do anything new, since its been asking people to join for many years now, somewhat (ok, a lot) more vocally of late. It's changing how it spends a relatively small amount of its money in a way that's intended to attach more value to membership.

Speaking for myself and not as a Board member, what *I* would say is that I think federations have a strong incentive to provide support services focused on use of software like Shibboleth (and not exclusively so) as a federating tool. I think campuses using it in an enterprise capacity internally at scale have an incentive to financially support the project and to get access to a strong level of support in doing so, and that that's a reasonable thing to ask for the amount of money involved. I've thought that for a lot more years than the Consortium has existed. I fully intend to see my own university do that and I've made that pretty clear locally. But politics is politics, it takes time.

-- Scott