[research] Federation

Federation Research & Notes

A list of resources, notes and links about Federation.

What we want from Federation

Goals

1. There should be more than one backpack.
2. When someone earns a badge, they should be able to push or pull that badge into the backpack of their choice.
3. If a user makes a badge public in their backpack, that badge should be easily discoverable.

Assumptions

1. Users may have to tell the issuer where their backpack is.

Discovery

Related to Federation - discovery. web host meta-data

well known uris

Some precedent / standards we might build on

JSON-LD

• Gregg Kellogg
• the JSON-LD spec
• ActivityStreams * Schema.org connection

WebFinger

• James Snell
• Brett Slatkin on WebFist

OpenPeer

Interesting list of design considerations from OpenPeer,

Must allow any peer to connect to any other peer (if authorized).
Must understand firewall principles and to offer an architecture which factors that firewalls are prevalent and within the natural scope of the architecture's basic design.
Must accept that it's not always desirable to have peer machines automatically promoted to rendezvous servers.
Must allow additional services to be layered onto of the architecture
Must enable peers to find each other using directory services.
Must enable secure peer-to-peer communication without penetration or monitoring by third parties.
Must allow peers to perform identity validations.
Must allow anonymous peers, i.e. similar to unlisted and non-guessable phone numbers.
Must allow for differing server rendezvous architectures, i.e. anywhere from peer-to-peer self-organized models to centralized network layouts are to be abstracted from the protocol.
Must not require end user signed certificates from a known authority chain for each peers on the network to establish secure communications.
Must not require end users or administrators to configure firewalls or open ports under normal circumstances.

More,

3.11.Peer Finder

A Peer Finder is a rendezvous server that keeps track of connected peers at their peer locations since they are connected in a dispersed fashion through a peer domain. A peer finder will utilize a database (typically distributed) to facilitation the introduction of peer communication on the same domain or across domains.
3.12.Bootstrapper

A Bootstrapper is the introductory server where peers first go to be introduced to one (or more) Peer Finders. Peers should attempt to connect to introduced Peer Finders in order to gain entry to the Peer Domain. Once a Peer is connected to a Bootstrapped Network, the Peer should no longer require communication back to the Bootstrapper unless access to previously introduced Peer Finders are no longer accessible.