UK Federation Launched

Today was the official launch of the UK Federation, or the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research to give its Sunday name. This is a huge deal for everyone involved, myself included: some people have been working towards this point since around 2000 (I’m a relative newcomer, only having put a couple of years into it so far).

In the longer term, this will be a fairly important system for many more people: after all, the UK Federation is a federated identity framework for the whole of the UK education and research sectors, which I’m told involve perhaps 18 million people. If we do our job well over the next few years, though, the best case is that like all good infrastructure it will just sink down below the point where people even notice it. That’s a hard job, and we’ve only just started on it.