AIMing Together

I got a taxi from the meeting with MIMAS to Piccadilly Station. I cut it a bit fine though. The 13.55 to London Euston pulled out just a couple of minutes after I got sat down. The train was quite quiet and we had a mostly unimpeded run down the West Coast main line in about two hours. The plan was to take the Northern Line to London Bridge and change there to get to Greenwich main line station for the JISC AIM Programme’s get-together dinner that evening in Greenwich. Luckily I saw the whiteboard with the notice about a line-side fire at London Bridge that was causing major disruption, so switched horses and took the Docklands Light Railway from Bank out to Cutty Sark via Canary Wharf instead. I got the benefit of a front seat, the driverless DLR being one of the few trains where you can see out the front as if you were the driver, adding to the tourist experience.

We all met up at the Admiral’s Bar in the Devonport House hotel to walk to the nearby restaurant (everything in Maritime Greenwich has a nautical flavour). It was a good choice of place and there were few enough of us (about a dozen) for people to be able to talk to each other. I was sat next to a trio from the University of Kent: Bonnie Ferguson, George Inman and Matthew Slowe. Bonnie corresponded with me previously when I was doing SDSS technical support for the UK federation but we had never met; George had corresponded with me when we were both working on the JISC Review of OpenID but we had only previously met once (at the AIM Programme Briefing Day in Birmingham in September 2009); Matthew and I were meeting for the first time. Chris Brown, the JISC Programme Manager, was also sitting next to us.

Other than just getting to know each other a bit better, I got to find out a bit more about the AIM project that Kent is working on, Logins for Life. This is a joint attempt by Kent’s information services directorate and David Chadwick’s information systems security research group in the school of computing to look properly at how individuals could access university services using whatever existing personal account(s) they might already have (e.g., an OpenID). The accounts used might also change over time. This is instead of the present approach of having to use a university-issued account to access university services. This was one of the possibilities we looked at in the OpenID review, which was a joint effort between Kent and EDINA. It always seemed quite appealing to me (I remember floating it in a blue-sky discussion with Nate Klingenstein) but we got a dose of cold water from the (few) actual IT support people we spoke to (“how would that benefit the institution?”) So it’s good to see Kent having a go.