Help Shape the Future of The InCommon Federation
The Profiling OpenID Federation for Research and Education (PORE) working group spent two years investigating the future of federated trust in our community. Now, they are ready for feedback. The group – chartered by Internet2’s Community Architecture Committee for Trust and Identity (CACTI) – has released its draft recommendation, and we need your help.
From Study to Engagement
The PORE recommendation calls on InCommon to commit resources to advancing OpenID Federation as foundational infrastructure for next-generation trust services. After extensive technical investigation — including deep dives into the OpenID Federation 1.0 specification, hands-on deployment work with reference implementations such as Italy’s SPID/CIE OpenID Federation, and coordination with European colleagues running the eduGAIN OpenID Federation pilot — the group concluded that further progress requires real, pre-production deployment experience with active community participation.
Why does this matter?
What we, as a community, invest in over the next two to five years will shape the next quarter-century of capability in our domain.
OpenID Federation is emerging as the most viable path forward for building agile, extensible trust infrastructures — and the standards and profiles that will govern them are being shaped now, internationally. The eduGAIN pilot is underway. Italy has production deployments. Taiwan is building citizen wallet infrastructure on these foundations. Login.gov is encouraging OpenID Connect for new federal integrations.
If the U.S. research and education community does not help shape this work today, we risk inheriting trust models built around someone else’s requirements, finding ourselves on an isolated island, using approaches incompatible with the broader global ecosystem. The communities actively deploying OpenID Federation now are the ones shaping it, and the window to have a seat at that table is open now (but not indefinitely).
This recommendation also looks beyond single sign-on. The same trust mechanisms that OpenID Federation establishes are foundational for interoperable learner credentials, diplomas, academic transcripts, professional credentialing, wallet-based electronic identity, cryptographic agility against quantum-era threats, and trust frameworks for agentic AI.
Early investment means building on a solid foundation rather than reinventing one later.
Ready to weigh in?
The draft recommendation and feedback form are available here: PORE WG – Community Consultation For Letter of Recommendation to CACTI.
How to weigh in?
- Open the draft recommendation from the consultation page and note any line numbers where you have comments or suggested changes.
- Submit your feedback using the Community Consultation form, referencing those line numbers (also linked from the same page).
All responses are due June 27 at 12 p.m. CT.
What happens next?
Over the next 30 days, InCommon will collect community feedback. Your comments will go directly to the PORE working group and CACTI, as they finalize the recommendation ahead of publication.
The stakes extend beyond document review. If you have spent time, effort, and resources helping build this community’s identity and trust infrastructure, this is your chance to help determine where it goes next.
Read the draft, share your perspective, and pass this along to other colleagues within the community who also deserve to have a voice in this decision.
The PORE working group thanks you for your time and investment in the future of federated trust in the research and education community.
