Our Year of Getting on the Road Again

By Kevin Morooney - Vice President of Trust and Identity and NET+, Internet2

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

2022 InCommon Accomplishments Report Available Now

“On the road again/Just can’t wait to get on the road again/The life I love is making music with my friends.”
—Willie Nelson

This iconic musical refrain aptly sums up our 2022. When the COVID-19 pandemic offered a reprieve, we took the opportunity to connect with members of the InCommon community face to face. From TNC in Trieste to EDUCAUSE in Denver, we were back on the road again. 

Seeing so many of you last year energized and inspired our team in immeasurable ways that we believe you’ll see reflected in the work we do together in the near future. I encourage you to take a look at the 2022 InCommon Accomplishments Report, here are some highlights from last year.

Highlights

• InCommon Academy reached many hundreds of community members with both breadth and depth. Whether going wide or deep, participants unambiguously placed high value (an average 4.5/5 rating across all activities) on how IA assists in their professional development.

• The InCommon Federation infrastructure got better last year. The Federation is of higher quality, more trustworthy, and more secure. Baseline Expectations and the Sirtfi tabletop exercise were major contributors to these improvements.

• Organizational IAM infrastructures and services are constantly changing to meet institutional objectives. The InCommon Trusted Access Platform demonstrated how it can also rapidly adapt to help take on these demands. For example, there were more than 100 new features added to Grouper last year.

• Digital certificate management can be an unsung hero of a security infrastructure. Rapidly changing standards for certificate management drive organizations toward ever-increasing automation. Sectigo and the InCommon Certificate Service have embraced ACME to help organizations with their automation goals. Serving nearly 700 organizations, managing hundreds of thousands of certificates to keep pace with change is challenging, and the certificate service delivered.

• eduroam continues its rapid expansion in the U.S. Building on massive changes made to the infrastructure, eduroam is taking root in K-12 through the eduroam Support Organization Program. Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, Oregon, and Connecticut have helped eduroam participation levels zoom past 1,000 subscribers last year, and the growth appears to only be getting started.
  

2022 was another dizzying year of change and growth in Trust and Identity at Internet2. The engine making these changes happen are the InCommon community leaders who volunteered 2,000+ hours of their time to help define and achieve a shared future. 

And 2023 is already off to a promising start. We’re already preparing to go on the road again as we meet and greet many of you at Internet2’s upcoming Community Exchange in Atlanta. We can’t wait to see you! 

Until then, thank you for all you have contributed, and continue to contribute, to accomplishing our goals for the community. I just love reading this report every year it comes out. It’s like watching a movie that I love for a second time. I appreciate the work, the impact, and the people that much more after a second viewing.

For more highlights from 2022, you can download the entire report. For questions about the report or InCommon, contact us at help@incommon.org or incommon.org/help.  

ICYMI

• Getting the Band Back Together at TechEX
• We’re Accomplished!