Polder Consortium

For the past few months I've been involved in the Technical Steering group of the Polder Consortium.

The Polder Consortium helps organizations establish environments of trust for sharing critical information across organizational boundaries. 

It involves Wycliffe and a couple of other mission organisations at the moment. Deciding what sort of organisations it should involve has been one of the things we've discussed on our teleconferences. My particular interest is authenticating a local application that I've written against one of our corporate systems. When it comes to the technical stuff and the discussions that accompany the beginnings of such a co-operative venture I'm a bystander, but it's interesting to watch the formation of this group. If you want a bit of technical detail then let me throw out a few words: SAML, federated identity, Shibboleth.

If you want to dive in a bit more I suggest you look at slides from an ICCM 2011 Presentation of Federated Identity. If you're wondering "Why the word polder?" then follow that link.

Update: I didn't realise until now the Polder Consortium is on twitter too.

Photo of the Petronas Towers Skybridge courtesy of Shubert Ciencia.

What exactly do you do, Dad?

One of my sons asked me this yesterday as we were swimming in the on-site swimming pool at lunchtime. (Note to self: write blog post on the perks of working at the Wycliffe Centre.) It's hard to give a good answer to that, but if he'd asked me, "what did you do today, Dad?", on Monday, I could have said, "I made a new website go live".

The actual going live was done in a second by renaming a directory, but I've been part of a small team working on it on the last few months. I took the same basic template as our Wycliffe Centre website and with a bit of consultation with the original designer on suitable (purple and serious academic looking) colours came up with this new site. Most of the work was done by one of my colleagues who redid the wording on the old site for pages, and for course descriptions.

You can find more details on what "ETP" is on our corporate blog.