[Building Sakai] What are your group and role integration needs?

[Ray Davis]

A couple of years ago, a Sakai team asked the community for help 
understanding your institutional structures as they might ideally be 
known to your LMS/CLE. That effort led to an abstraction of "course 
management" data which was more practically useful than those that had 
preceded it. But our ability to use this new model in an optimal way 
from Sakai applications was hobbled by lack of dedicated personnel and 
by the need to preserve legacy approaches to site management and 
permission handling.

This year, the time seems right to finally take on the issues of 
federated authorization:

* IMS is about to bring out their Learning Information Services proposal 
<http://www.imsglobal.org/enterprise.cfm>, which I expect will meet all 
the use cases met by the Sakai CM API in a way that attracts the 
attention of developers from outside the Sakai community. For example, 
the attention of...

* Oracle, who has an early implementation built on PeopleSoft: 
http://www.oracle.com/applications/peoplesoft/campus_solutions/ent/module/student-administration-integration-pack.html

* Which is turn is being used by Unicon as a new integration point for 
Sakai: 
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/IMSES/Sakora+Project+Update

* But also being used by Moodlerooms as a new integration point for 
Moodle: 
http://mfeldstein.com/moodlerooms-doing-great-standards-based-integration-work/

* Meanwhile, many schools are looking for secure ways to cut maintenance 
costs by going through external hosting solutions like Google Apps: 
http://www.google.com/educators/p_apps.html

* And meanwhile, many schools are looking for new ways to let their 
LMS/CLE mash up external Web 2.0 applications or take advantage of cloud 
services.

* And meanwhile, Internet2 has started a working group to understand 
access management needs across a wide range of software products and 
services: http://middleware.internet2.edu/paccman/

* While Internet2's COmanage project continues to try to share 
authorization data more efficiently across applications: 
http://middleware.internet2.edu/co/

* And then there are these efforts called "Sakai 3" and "K2" which you 
may have heard something about...

So I'm sending this to ask you to start thinking and talking about how 
you'd ideally like to see groups, roles, and permissions handled in your 
college's or university's open source collaborative framework -- 
particularly when it comes to merging "inside the application" views 
(like "assign authorship of this research paper to this particular 
subset of site members") with "outside the application" views (like 
"Philosophy majors" or "my Facebook friends").

We don't yet have a specific Sakai mailing list, wiki space, or Google 
Group for this work, but I'll keep track of discussions until we find 
the proper spot. Unfortunately, for the next couple of weeks I'll have 
only part-time network access. However, starting at the end of May I 
should be able to convey more Sakai use cases to the MACE-paccman group, 
and in June I'll be attending the Educause CAMP summit on Identity 
Services: <http://net.educause.edu/CAMP093>.

Thanks in advance for your help and (continued) patience,
Ray