RA21: Resource Access for the 21st Century

RA21 Workshop – April 25, 2017

The RA21 project is picking up speed! On April 25, there will be a workshop in Washington, DC, focused on the academic pilot efforts. Each pilot will have an hour to discuss the goals and outputs expected from that effort, and to discuss the particular challenges that are the target of that pilot’s efforts. The corporate pilot will also have some time to discuss the related work going on with that group.

The P3W pilot will be exploring the best practices that come from using a modified Account Chooser that stores the users preference of Identity Provider (IdP) locally in their browser; it will also be looking to improve the user experience of IdP discovery. The first time visiting a participating site, users will be presented with a streamlined UI to select their preferred IdP and sign in; thereafter, this preference will be stored in their browser allowing the user to be seamlessly signed into other participating sites on future visits. This pilot is looking for participants to help develop the UX, build the software tools and create the test environment. The pilot is also looking for campuses and libraries that would be willing to switch over to using the pilot in place of existing IP authorization for the participating publisher sites.

The Shared WAYF pilot seeks to validate the use of a cloud service to facilitate communication between publisher platforms for the purpose of discovery of the Identity Provider most appropriate for each user. This pilot is looking for both publishers willing to integrate their platforms to the wayf-cloud service, and publishers with content on the Literatum platform from Atypon. The pilot is also looking for campuses and libraries that would be willing to switch over to using the pilot in place of existing IP authorization for the participating sites and titles.

The Client-based WAYF pilot is exploring a solution that would use an existing service (samlbits.org) to build a database of Service Providers (SPs) Identity Providers (IdPs) and  that are automatically queried to determine if the SP and IdP can work together. When a user starts the authentication process for the first time, they will be presented with a list of IdPs that are known to work with that SP, as well as information on what to do if their IdP is not on the list. This pilot is looking for publishers that are willing to work with the project team on the best way to the existing samlbits discovery service and development resources to determine the best way to populate the metadata registry with hints from the Service Providers regarding what IdP are likely to work in an authorization scenario.

Approximately 30 people are expected to attend; if you are planning to attend and have not yet registered for this free event, please contact the RA21 project coordinators! A QR code is required to get to the meeting space.