...
At the very core of it, there are different connection policies, for example, some countries do not allow connecteing institutions that are not financed by the governement, overseas institutions are classed as 'private' (e.g. Spain). In addition, there are political and technological barriers, for example, government restrictions in China (IpV6, firewall). There are also political barriers that we are not going to solve - such as the ban of institutes from abroad in Hungary - those should still be taken into consideration and possible barriers for collaboration should be removed. The main questions then are:
- Can we treat a foreign institution as a local education institution?
- How to work with country specific barriers?
- Reciprocal agreements?
- Can we come up with a global oriented policy?
Some of the work has been done in this area by Jisc - they have a Strategic Alliance with CERNET, which could potentially be expanded for other GÉANT members. Internet2 has agreements with CERNET and KISTI; GARR is work in progress.
Technical Barriers
William Wan, CERNET
One other 'Big Issue' that needs to be taken into consideration when talking about TNE is technical barriers. William grouped those digital divides into 4 main groups:
| Challenges | Solutions | |
|---|---|---|
| CONNECTIVITY | • International line could be costly and not stable ... | • Exploring R&E networks ... |
| INTEROPERABILITY | • IPv6 and other technological issues | • Standards |
| OPERATIONAL | • Institutions might not have the right peering policies with multiple internet connections | • Try to optimize with R&E network infrastructure |
| REGULATIONS | • Government policies (e.g. Firewall, etc.) | • In-country knowledge is key |
Suggested services that need to be develped to address the challenges are end-to-end support and 24/7 service desks.
Tools, toolkits and resources
Esther Wilkinson, Jisc
The main tasks of this workstream are to
- identify tools and resources already in existance,
- to develop a suite of tools and resources
- and to understand requirements of tools and resources to more directly support education institutions or policy stakeholders in the NREN country
to enable NRENs to support TNE, individually and globally and enable accesability.
Esther presented a few examples of existing tools and information sharing platforms that can be used or adopted by NRENs, such as:
- GÉANT Interactive Connectivity Map,
- UK (Jisc) TNE Tech Special Interest Group, connecting 23 higher education institutions,
- Jisc TNE Toolkit (checklists for NRENs and education institutions supporting TNE),
- the blog of case studies In the Field,
- TNE registration form, used by Jisc and HEAnet
- GÉANT SIG-TNE wiki page
A couple of areas that this group could work on to add onto the abovementioned resources are collecting and publishing country specific info and writing up more success stories for the 'In the Field' blog and other media.
Next steps
• Steering Committee to develop SIG-TNE Workplan based on todays discussions and share on SIG Wiki
• Survey SIG-TNE members on Workplan contents and call for contributors
• Plan and communicate next meetings of SIG-TNE every six months (on or around November 2017, then TNC18)
• Continue to develop SIG-TNE Wiki site resources