By Kevin Morooney, vice president of Trust and Identity and NET+, Internet2
Learn. Share. Belong. This has become the theme of InCommon BaseCAMP since we started it four years ago. And it makes sense because these verbs have been the cornerstone for over 20 years of conversations about trust and identity in the Internet2 and InCommon communities.
This year’s BaseCAMP was the largest ever with 118 attendees from 45 different organizations and institutions; from as far west as the University of Guam to the north (the University of New Brunswick), the south (Florida Atlantic University), and the east (Babson College). Several commercial providers of cloud-based services, health care organizations, and two US Department of Energy Labs were also in attendance. 40 – yes, 40 – community members served on the program committee, as content developers, instructors, and facilitators.
The very passionate and caring Internet2 staff, as always, were behind the scenes making sure everything went smoothly. This ratio of attendees to organizers shows up in the ethos of the event, making it a very intimate learning experience. With this level of attendance, BaseCAMP now rivals the long-running CAMP and ACAMP (Advanced CAMP) series when considering community impact. Making BaseCAMP that much more special is that most of the attendees are new to the community. BaseCAMP is making the community of identity and access management professionals bigger but more importantly, better connected.
The week starts off as you would expect with a day of introducing various topics. The meat of the program includes discussions about people registries, provisioning and de-provisioning of services, authentication, access management, and federation (access management beyond one’s home organization’s borders). Through this journey, campers learn about community tools and infrastructures that are available to them (the InCommon Federation, the InCommon Trusted Access Platform) as they ideate with each other about how they’ll apply what they’ve learned.
Perhaps the biggest value proposition of BaseCAMP is that it creates a judgment-free zone as to how and why a particular organization chooses its solutions. BaseCAMP is about identity and access management (IAM) best practices and how to integrate solutions — community, commercial, or otherwise — not selling or promoting one tool or another. IAM is quite challenging in higher education and research environments. Having a place to come together to learn about the trade of IAM helps technology leaders make the best decisions for their needs.
Technology changes constantly. Policies, laws, and sensibilities about risk change constantly. To continue to address the global access management requirements of research and education, our commitment to learning, sharing, and belonging must also be a constant. InCommon BaseCAMP 2022 attendees and organizers contributed mightily to the ties that bind us. Can’t wait until next year!
Interested in continuing the conversation about IAM and learning more from the community? Join us December 5–7 in Denver at TechEx 22.