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New funding for AIM October 13, 2011

Posted by chriscb in : AIM , add a comment

In these times of financial uncertainty it gives us Programme Managers even more pleasure to announce new funding opportunities. This week we (JISC) have announced the “JISC Grant funding 16/11: JISC Digital infrastructure programme” call. This call contains the following 6 strands:

A good summary of the whole call is on the Digital Infrastructure Team blog.

Although I am managing the Research Tools and AIM work, as this blog is all about the AIM programme, this  posting is just a summary of the AIM strand.

AIM Strand

There is £200,000 available to fund 5-10 projects investigating the embedding of access and identity management outputs and technological solutions within institutions. To the right of this blog post you will see links for all the projects funded under the AIM Programme. Two of these projects, namely RAPTOR and SMART, have received follow-on funding to help to standardise their work and increase uptake of their tools.

So why is this call any different from the follow-on funding work?  The main difference is that this call is looking at the embedding of any relevant AIM/IAM technology. It is not restricted to the embedding of outputs from the AIM programme, although we welcome interesting bids that want to do either. The call is not looking to build new technological solutions but embed the ones that already exist. RAPTOR and SMART have produced interesting tools and solutions. We have funded much work in Grouper, for example. What other tools could be embedded within institutions to improve their access and identity management processes and uptake? We’d really like to see how OAuth is being used within institutions, particularly within collaborative environments.

Identity Management is fundamental to the successful operation of an institution but are institutions taking their responsibilities in this area seriously? Are they aware of some of the possibilities available from the technological solutions available? By funding projects that embed these outputs within communities it should increase their uptake and use within institutions.

If you want more information then please read about the AIM strand in the call document. It gives an overview of the AIM Programme and more detail on what sort of bids we are looking for. Whether you decide to bid or not, please circulate the call to as many people as you can. Access and identity management is a core part of an institution, without which it couldn’t function. It’s also a part of nearly every other programme within JISC. Unfortunately, it suffers from the middleware effect and so institutions don’t dedicate the resources required to resolve many of the AIM/IAM issues. However, hopefully this call will go some way to ensuring that AIM problems are being solved, and not just from a technological standpoint.

The 26 and 27 October have been pencilled in as dates to contact Programme Managers about the call, but you are welcome to contact me at any time. Just send me an email and I will call you back. My contact details are on the JISC staff pages.