Internet2 announced today the selection of two new members and reappointment of two returning members to the InCommon Steering Committee:

  • Mike Erickson, chief information officer at Colorado School of Mines, will serve a three-year term.
  • Laura Paglione, director of strategic initiatives at ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), will serve a three-year term.
  • Pankaj Shah, president and chief executive officer at Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN), is reappointed to a second three-year term.
  • Sean Reynolds, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Northwestern University, is reappointed to a second three-year term.

More than 950 institutions across the United States – including colleges, universities, government and nonprofit laboratories, research centers, agencies, and industry partners – rely on InCommon's identity management framework or take advantage of the InCommon Certificate Service for securing their web infrastructure.

The InCommon framework is based on federated identity, a mechanism by which a person can use credentials issued by their home institution to authenticate locally, then be authorized for access by the resource provider. This single sign-on environment protects privacy and sends only the necessary information to an online resource to establish access.

The InCommon Federation was formed in 2004 as a way of scaling the many online relationships an organization maintains when offering services to another or enabling access for its users to another’s services.

Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) added InCommon collaboration-ready requirements to its Campus Cyberinfrastructure Solicitation to help ensure that researchers can successfully use their campus credentials to access research-related services available via global federation.

About Internet2

Internet2® is a non-profit, member-driven advanced technology community founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 delivers a diverse portfolio of technology solutions that leverages, integrates, and amplifies the strengths of its members and helps support their educational, research and community service missions. Internet2’s core infrastructure components include the nation’s largest and fastest research and education network that was built to deliver advanced, customized services that are accessed and secured by the community-developed trust and identity framework.

For more information, visit www.internet2.edu or follow @Internet2 on Twitter.