For the promotion of the deployment of Federations of Identity connected to eduGAIN and the academic Wi-Fi roaming eduroam, we have focused our action through training of the NREN technicians and promotion of the advantages of the technologies in meetings and conferences where the NRENs meet regionally and Worldwide. We have taken advantage of the regional organisations that group NRENs in the participating World regions, namely: ASREN for the Arab Countries, CAREN for Central Asian countries, UbuntuNet Alliance for East and South Africa, CKLN for The Caribbean, TEIN for South and East Asia, GÉANT for Europe and RedCLARA for Latin America.
In order to ease the use of applications aimed at group collaboration, we have chosen Colaboratorio and SYMPA as the basic technologies for GMF (Group Management in Federations) while VOOT has been selected to carry on the integration. As a key result of this project, we have implemented a test bed where user groups built in the Colaboratorio can now use applications in the SYMPA environment as easily as authenticating as user of a user group in the Colaboratorio. This combination of technologies is a building block for applications sharing between NRENs and has the potential to allow users across the World to take advantage of collaboration applications developed and run elsewhere without leaving its familiar environment or having to open a new account somewhere else.
The work in objective c) aimed at disseminating and training on NRENnum technology. The idea is to use a standard E.164 numbering scheme (telephone system numbering) to identify all devices and thus make dialling though all these systems alike. We developed training material in the form of on line material including video presentations to allow anyone interested in deploying NRENnum to do it in just a few minutes. We also made dissemination presentations in several meetins in Africa, Latin America and Asia and provided support for the deployment of new NRENum domains.
The other important challenge that we faced in this project regarding the video conferencing facilities is the integration between Videoconference Rooms (H.323) and web conference systems. Commercial systems exist for this, but the academic community has strong interest in Open Source solutions. We developed an open source gateway to integrate MCONF and the H.323 systems using SIP dialling.
In order to put this technology to work with end users across the World, we fostered the development of 3 Global Science Communities (GSC) by starting from existing communities, where available, in three major scientific topics of global interest: Biodiversity, Environment and e-Health. The fourth one, Remote Instrumentation was supported following a request from the community in Mexico. The communities succeeded in attracting researcher from Africa, the Arab Countries, Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America.
The other cornerstone of the support to the user communities is the Funding and Partners Database, an application developed to facilitate access from users to funding opportunities around the World. This includes H2020 and Erasmus calls, but also opportunities from the German agencies DFG and DAAD, the US agency NSF and many others. This tool is a great attractor for users to stay and register in the Colaboratorio environment.
In order to reach the community of NRENs we have participated in the main conferences of the Regional Research and Education Networks namely: ASREN’s e-AGE, GEANT’s TNC, RedCLARA’s TICAL, Ubuntunet Alliance Conferences, CAREN Conference, WACREN conferences and IST Africa 2015 and 2017 conferences.
The dissemination tools also include the website:
http://magic-project.eu(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie) where we have included video testimonials and dissemination material.
