GLOBAL NEWS
ELCIRA COMPLETES BUSY FIRST YEAR
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t the end of May 2013, the ELCIRA (Europe Latin America Collaborative eInfrastructure for Research Activities) Project reached the end of the first year of its 24-month duration. Led by the Latin American R&E networking organisation, RedCLARA, and partnered by the NRENs of Brazil (RNP) and Colombia (RENATA) in Latin America, and DANTE, TERENA, GARR and RedIRIS in Europe, ELCIRA aims to enhance collaboration between Europe and Latin America. This work is being carried out by a number of Work Packages which focus on the areas such as extending Identify Federations in Latin America; videoconferencing directories and dialling systems; promoting the deployment of eduroam® in Latin America; providing collaboration tools to enable research project participants to work together more effectively; and foster collaboration between European and Latin American researchers. The successes of ELCIRA participants since the beginning of June 2013 include the following: • In addition to the Brazilian Identity Federation, CAFe, which was established before the start of ELCIRA, and is already a member of eduGAIN, the Chilean Federation COFRe is already in the process of joining eduGAIN. In Peru a pilot
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federation now exists and federations are also emerging in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico. • Agreements have been made by the GÉANT eduCONF team and the RedCLARA SIVIC team to bring the two services closer together, by having a common videoconference facility certification process, an integrated directory of VC facilities and an integrated dialling system. Another area that is being explored is the possibility of a federated support system. • The first meeting of the ELCIRA team held in Lima, Peru, in July 2009, was a catalyst for the establishment of eduroam by the Peruvian NREN, RAAP. To date, eduroam is also available in Brazil and Chile, and in Mexico, eduroam is in the deployment phase. Three other countries (Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica) have eduroam Candidate status. • ELCIRA has agreed on a suite of tools to be made available to research groups to make their collaboration more effective. The tools consist of web-conferencing (using MCONF developed by RNP), a wiki tool, a collaboration platform and a large file transfer tool. A tools portal has been developed and is currently in a pilot stage which allows NRENs in Latin America and Europe to make the tools available to user communities in their respective countries.
• By creating a database of FP7funded projects involving participants from Latin America, together with a tool to visualise this information, ELCIRA has developed a method of easily identifying Europe-Latin America research projects which could benefit from other services offered through ELCIRA. Work has also focused on providing InfoDays which provide information to interested groups on European Commission funding opportunities. The InfoDays have been made possible through a blueprint also developed by ELCIRA to implement large-scale intercontinental videoconferences. Finally, a video tutorial has been created to show users how to use the services developed by ELCIRA. The ELCIRA successes on eduGAIN and videoconferencing have relied on close collaboration between the ELCIRA project and the GÉANT eduGAIN and eduCONF services. A commitment to continue this collaboration was formalised at the Maastricht TERENA Networking Conference in June 2013 where Memorandums of Understanding between ELCIRA and eduGAIN on the one hand, and eduCONF on the other, were signed. For more information on ELCIRA, visit: http://www.elcira.eu/.