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| Nomination | Organisation | Nominated by | Candidate Statement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Muhammad Farhan Sjaugi | SIFULAN Malaysian Access Federation | Self nominated | As co-founder of SIFULAN Malaysian Access Federation and have been participating in many Identity Federation activities/projects particularly in the Asia-Pacific region for the past 10 years, I am passionate about helping economies/states/countries to develop their identity federation infrastructure, building their technical capacity, and eventually joining the eduGAIN. If re-elected to the Steering Committee, within my capacity, I will help to bring the aspiration from the developing federation to be at par with the developed federation and helping to achieve eduGAIN's vision and mission. |
| Dalia Abraham | Australian Access Federation | Self nominated | |
| Bas Zoetekouw | SURFconext | Self nominated | I have been involved with the Dutch federation SURFconext for the past 15 years in different functions. Since this summer, I have been responsible for its operations and serve as the deputy eduGAIN delegate for SURF. Before that, I have focused on establishing the SURF Research Access Management service, which allows for easy and effective delegated identity management for research collaborations. In connection with this work, I contribute to the AEGIS group and the AARC3 project. These experiences have shown me how powerful eduGAIN can be in enabling international collaborations, as well as its pitfalls. I believe an infrastructure like eduGAIN is essential for facilitating international collaboration, but we must ensure it remains relevant. It seems eduGAIN has hardly evolved in the past 15 years, while the identity and access management landscape has changed dramatically. Major players like Google and Microsoft now dominate this space; they offer rich functionality beyond what we can realistically match. Additionally, the world has shifted towards OIDC, whereas SAML has in essence become a legacy standard. Without significant evolution, I feel that there is a real risk that eduGAIN and SAML federations will become obsolete within the next decade. Therefore, we need to adapt in the next couple of years if we want to preserve the open values eduGAIN represents. I believe such change is achievable, but we must clearly define our added value, and should make sure that eduGAIN is easy to implement for service providers and intuitive for end users. Connecting services and using them must be seamless—it should Just Work. |
| Jonathan Eagan | CANARIE (Canadian Access Federation) | Self nominated | As Program Manager for Identity and Access Management at CANARIE, I've been instrumental in shaping the Canadian Access Federation's strategic vision. I'm deeply committed to eduGAIN, which already fosters significant collaboration among academic and research institutions. However, I believe we can further enhance eduGAIN's capabilities. If re-elected to the Steering Committee, I will advocate for implementing eduGAIN's vision: a more robust metadata infrastructure that ensures authentic, accurate, and interoperable exchanges. We can better empower the research and education community by extending our trust framework to enable secure, trustworthy, and purpose-driven international federated transactions. |
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