FIM4R 15th Workshop photo by Petr Gašparík
27 people met on the 17th of February 2020 for FIM4R in Vienna, cohosted with the TIIME workshop. Many thanks to the organisers for making the logistics so smooth!
We started the day with updates from the several Research Communities; NIAID VRO, CERN and WLCG, LifeScience AAI, GA4GH, PaNOSC, FENIX and DARIAH. Slides are available with the Agenda. In the afternoon we heard from AEGIS, which defines interoperability guidelines for infrastructures, and from the GN4 Project. One key FIM4R requirement was to find a working solution for command-line based workflows, we heard about oidc-agent which is already proving useful to many Research Communities.
There was a lively discussion around data driven impact assessment of FIM – how can Research Community Service Providers pool their statistics to bring transparency to FIM usage? Suggestions of quantitative data to collect included:
- Proportion of Federated authentications vs alternative (local account, social provider)
- Failed authentications due to attribute release
- Number of support tickets related to Federated authentications
- Research proposals and grant submissions resulting from Federated users
At the same time it was recognised that collecting qualitative data, such as user satisfaction, held enormous value despite being more complicated to collect. Many expressed the reality that user feedback was only offered when federated authentication failed (and was exclusively negative!). An unconference session was held on Thursday to further explore which data we should be collecting.
The EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) AAI Task has asked for feedback from FIM4R on how we envisage AAI in the European Open Science Cloud. An unconference session was held on Wednesday to produce a first draft of a 1 page position paper.
We ended the day with a look to the future. FIM4R Community Use Case blogs will continue to be published, with our second blog to cover the IRIS Research Infrastructure in the coming months. Although the next FIM4R meeting is not yet planned, there was recognition that we are not reaching new Research Communities and the idea was floated to hold a larger FIM4R conference. Discussions will continue over the coming months, please keep an eye on the mailing list!