Advanced CAMP:
Leveraging Campus Infrastructure to Support Virtual Organizations Workshop

In the digital age, a large component of scholarly activity entails groups of faculty, students, or researchers collaborating online. These clusters of colleagues, called virtual organizations, can be characterized by

• working together across multiple independent, physical institutions;
• sharing distributed computer, information, and instrumentation resources; and
• needing multiple methods of collaboration.

Virtual organizations typically span institutional boundaries, while our current technical approaches and tools support collaboration solely within the confines of our campuses. Beyond the technical issues, sharing valuable resources among institutions also raises issues about control, privacy, and appropriate use that our current local policy structures don't address. And although access management is a major concern, issues such as resource discovery within or among virtual organizations and providing tools and services to diagnose access and related problems are also important for effective collaboration.

“Advanced CAMP: Leveraging Campus Infrastructures to Support Virtual Organizations” provides a chance for faculty, researchers, and central IT staff to explore the requirements and needs for new end-user tools that leverage local infrastructures to manage and grant access to resources in a virtual organization.

The workshop will open by discussing virtual organizations (VOs) and presenting several use cases from diverse subject areas such as medical, grid science, teaching and learning, and other scholarly disciplines. Attendees will then have a chance to discuss

• common characteristics,
• challenges,
• emerging technical and policy models, and
• potential services that could help VO participants collaborate more effectively.

Subsequent presentations and discussions will focus on how current environments, architectures, tools, and services can be adapted to best fit the identified requirements. Additional topics include existing methodologies that leverage a VO participant's primary institutional credentials and identity data to access these virtual clusters of resources.

Sessions are tailored to researchers, faculty, graduate students, and IT staff from the medical, library, teaching and learning, grid science, and other scholarly areas. Additional audiences include central campus IT staff interested in learning more about how to integrate their infrastructure with this multiorganizational collaboration environment.

An in-depth knowledge and experience with implementing identity management or working in a VO is assumed. Attendees who would find the most value from these sessions include:

• researchers, faculty, and graduate students, and IT staff who participate in or support VO environments
• central campus IT strategists, technology architects, and related leadership

CAMP is sponsored by the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative-Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies (NMI-EDIT) Consortium: Internet2, EDUCAUSE, and SURA, Additional support was provided by the National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement NSF-02-028, ANI-012937. For information about NMI-EDIT and participation in the NSF Middleware Initiative, see www.nmi-edit.org.