New Architecture Advisory Group Reflects Local and Global Perspectives

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

CACTI (Community Architecture Committee for Trust and Identity) is a new advisory group to the Internet2 Vice President for Trust and Identity, Kevin Morooney. CACTI’s 12 members are drawn from the Internet2 research and education community domestically and internationally. The intentional community cross-section is to help equip CACTI with a variety of perspectives, from the campus level to global inter-federation partners, as it provides input on trust and identity topics. It’s this diversity of perspectives that will help offer better insight into what’s next…

By Christopher Phillips, Technical Architect for CANARIE’s Canadian Access Federation

CACTI (Community Architecture Committee for Trust and Identity) is a new advisory group to the Internet2 Vice President for Trust and Identity, Kevin Morooney. CACTI’s 12 members are drawn from the Internet2 research and education community domestically and internationally. The intentional community cross-section is to help equip CACTI with a variety of perspectives, from the campus level to global inter-federation partners, as it provides input on trust and identity topics. It’s this diversity of perspectives that will help offer better insight into what’s next.

Trust and identity frameworks are no longer bounded by the campus and are more global than ever. Students, researchers, and faculty live and work in a context where the distance between collaborators and organizations is measured in milliseconds rather than miles, and trust needs to be wherever our community is.

While CACTI serves as an advisory group to Internet2, the expectation is to take a broad international perspective on architecture issues. Broadly defined in the CACTI charter, CACTI’s duties are to:

1. Provide strategic architectural input to Internet2’s trust and identity projects and activities.
2. Create and manage community working groups as needed in support of trust and identity goals, directions, projects and activities.
3. Manage and evolve community standards, e.g., schema, API contracts, MACE registry, etc., and the processes by which working groups operate and trust and identity documents are published. Coordinate and participate with external bodies in establishing such community standards. This body officially approves and adopts such standards and processes for Internet2 Trust and Identity.
4. Foster relationships and participate with other national and international  activities sufficiently to maintain visibility into developments and trends that are important to R&E and to promote/advocate a coordinated approach to their implementation.
5. Broadly share information of relevance with the R&E community about current activities in trust, identity, and associated middleware.
6. Maintain public and timely proceedings of the group’s activities and of the working groups it creates.
7. Engage as appropriate to help achieve education and outreach objectives for Internet2 trust and identity projects and activities.

The purposefully high-level duties allow CACTI broad involvement and has led our group to focus on familiarizing ourselves with the Internet2 working group landscape —  and we invite you to do the same. The working groups are a vibrant and highly collaborative community that routinely logs over 1,000 person hours of calls and face-to-face meetings every quarter. We hope that you will see a community that you can connect with.

Working groups are only one place CACTI draws from and would like to hear from you as well. If you have a topic, specific idea, theme, or direction that you are passionate about and think is important, we want to know. CACTI and its members can be reached by email at cacti-inquiry@internet2.edu or by connecting with a CACTI member[1].  Many of us will be present at the Internet2 Technology Exchange in San Francisco (October 15-19, 2017) and look forward to connecting with you!