Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
By Ken Klingenstein, Internet2 Evangelist for Trust and Identity
The Internet2 middleware initiative that would eventually grow into what is now known as InCommon began with a National Science Foundation-funded workshop called Early Harvest in the fall of 1999.
The workshop was intended to glean a first understanding of good approaches to academic identity and access management (IAM). A bunch of the usual suspects, led by R.L. “Bob” Morgan of the University of Washington and other leaders from campuses including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin, and University of Virginia, gathered in a conference hotel in Denver.
Those attending were struck by the commonalities of problems and divergence of approaches at our institutions, as well as the greenfields through which our cottage IAM industries might grow into a consistent fabric that enabled inter-institutional collaboration.
The seeds of InCommon were being planted.
As often happened then with small meetings, we were sharing our conference hotel with other groups. In this instance, we were next to a Western wear meeting. At breaks, we would go into hallways filled with crinoline skirts and cowboy boots, bolo ties and bandanas, and racks of rhinestone clothing for sale. We’d return to our middleware cave and talk a bit about what we had encountered in the lobby and hallways.
The juxtaposition between Western wear and middleware turned out to be quite valuable, leading to useful analogies throughout our meeting — and hearing Johnny Cash through the room dividers was oddly inspirational.
We learned a lot at that Early Harvest, and the ensuing report that came out of the workshop was widely circulated. It led to a whole host of initiatives to fulfill the promise we saw, including Shibboleth, eduPerson, and InCommon.
The workshop and its accompanying endeavors were foundational.
The InCommon 20th Birthday Party was held on Dec. 12, 2024, at the Internet2 Technology Exchange, attended by hundreds of conference attendees and members of the identity and access management community.
From Early Harvest to Futures2
The 2009 InCommon Futures Report lead to strategically important financial investments both by Internet2 and the InCommon community. Soon after those investments were made, InCommon grew many times more rapidly than previously.
InCommon was always a great idea. After the first InCommon Futures Report, InCommon started to have a great impact.
Trust, particularly multilateral trust, isn’t about a single institution. Rather, it is a community asset. Creating trust has been a heavy lift over decades as we have worked to align campus IAM infrastructures and processes to reliably trust each other across thousands of organizations. Technologies, procedures, contracts, and cultures are all touched.
The result is a true commons — something that has always been central to a society’s bonding. For centuries, the commons has been the place where almost all daily exchanges pass through. It is intentional that our U.S. research and education federation is called InCommon.
Now, 25 years after Early Harvest, the InCommon Futures2 report is generating a rich, successive harvest to create more effective academic collaborations with insights gathered from the current needs of the research and higher education community.
InCommon Futures2 responds to pressure in our community for new efficiencies, manages an ever-growing set of compliance requirements, and optimizes the value of the investments we have made in inter-institutional trust via InCommon.
To some degree, the success of that Early Harvest workshop in the fall of 1999 enabled both the substance and the process of the Futures2 work.
In substance, a key theme throughout the report is to find new ways to use the unique trust and identity infrastructure that InCommon has become.
For example, the report calls for InCommon to underpin a growing variety of instructional collaborations. IAM has become mission-critical to a wide range of academic missions, from sharing educational materials to conducting secure research across many disciplines. It is now time to leverage these opportunities to support the academic community.
At the heart of it, the Futures2 process is a harvest based on the spirit of cooperation among participants that drives the academy, unique among all verticals. It has been drawn from leadership committees, domain experts, and campus units that ultimately deliver the goods and services.
While the process has been nationwide — and there may not have been a single hotel lobby to provide the right backdrop — if you pay careful attention to the Futures2 report, you might hear Johnny Cash in the background, reminding us that the circle will not be broken.
About Ken Klingenstein
Ken Klingenstein is an evangelist for trust and identity at Internet2 and a leader of early internet adoption in the United States. In 2021, Klingenstein was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for helping to lead the expansion of the internet in the Western United States and playing an early and important role in the development of the internet’s identity and trust layers. Klingenstein helped lead the foundation of Internet2 in 1995 and established the Internet2 Middleware initiative.