Trust and Identity Policy Working Group

Ensuring that researchers can easily collaborate across national research organisations, facilities and services is a challenge. To address this issue, the AAF is coordinating a Trust and Identity Policy Working Group (T&I PWG), with the objective to identify a set of common policies that can be used by research collaborations, enabling trusted and secure collaboration across multiple services and organisations. 

The AAF is not starting from scratch, we are building on the learnings from the EU’s Authentication and Authorisation for Research Collaborations (AARC) organisation who has created a Policy Development Kit (AARC PDK) for just this purpose.

The policy templates in that kit cover all aspects of identity management within a research collaboration including privacy, membership management and critical incident management.

The AARC PDK identifies who is responsible for each policy, the target audience, and provides valuable questions organisations can ask themselves to assist with the process.  

In collaboration with fellow National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) funded facilities the T&I PWG is reviewing the Australian context, and considering whether this AARC PDK is appropriate for Australian research. The T&I PWG is reviewing the templated policies, both in the context of their own policy suites and within the terms of collaborations they are currently operating or are considering.

We aim to establish a standard set of policies that will support easy access to data and compute and enable research greater collaboration nationally and internationally. 

Key considerations that the T&I PWG is focussing on include how a system-wide policy approach would:

The Policy Working Group kicked off in September 2023, followed by a series of meetings and interviews.

The Policy Working Group documents published by the AAF.