Registration for the first TERENA and Internet2 hands-on audio/video production workshop is open until 8 July 2009. Potential participants are cordially requested to register as soon as possible via http://www.garr.it/papws.

The workshop will be held on 13-15 July 2009, hosted by GARR in cooperation with the Music Conservatory of Trieste, in Italy. The event will emphasise the equipment and staffing requirements for interactive performing arts education, multi-site performance events and high quality netcasting. It is meant to be the first in a series of annual workshops on this topic.

The new president of the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA) was elected by the General Assembly of its members during a meeting held on 11-12 June 2009 in Malaga, Spain. TERENA’s vice-president for conferences and treasurer were also re-elected and the association's 2009 membership fees and service costs were reviewed.

This year’s TERENA Networking Conference concluded today, Thursday 11 June, with a playful invitation for attendees to visit TNC in Vilnius, Lithuania. from 31 May to 3 June 2010.

Laimutis Telksnys of the Lithuanian research and education network LITNET presented a short film highlighting the city’s attractions, and participants of TNC 2009 received a picturesque puzzle-cube to take home as a reminder to attend next year.

Postgraduate students met leading figures from TERENA and Cisco at the TERENA Networking Conference this week, Tuesday 9 June. Recognising that today’s students are the future leaders of the networking community, TERENA invited students of relevant fields to attend TNC 2009. Cisco endorsed the initiative by providing sponsorship, enabling the students to attend the event free of charge, so being exposed to current best practices and cutting-edge technologies.

Archived streams of presentations from this year's TERENA Networking Conference (TNC 2009) are available on the conference website. Around 450 people attended the event, which also featured online presentation materials for those who could not be there in person.

The conference, with the theme ‘Virtuality into Reality', continued until 13.30 CET on Thursday. The closing plenary was delivered by Simone Brunozzi, Amazon.com’s Web Services Evangelist. In addition to five more plenary talks, each day included parallel sessions of presentations on a diverse range of topics.

All streams are available from http://tnc2009.terena.org.

The Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association, TERENA, published its annual report for 2008 this week, on 21 May 2009.

The report summarises the most significant developments in around 35 projects, services, task forces and other activities and the contributions made by the association's members, the wider research networking community and Secretariat staff.

Registration is open for a ‘basic’ EuroCAMP workshop on single sign-on (SSO) systems in Cork, Ireland, on 18-19 May 2009.

This two-day event will take place at the Cork Institute of Technology and will discuss the various technologies available to create a robust SSO system on campus. Leading experts from the research and education networking community and campus network managers will come together to present their findings and experiences.

A new version of the SCHAC (SCHema for ACademia) directory schema (1.4.0) is available for download from from the SCHAC web page, under the section called ‘SCHAC Releases’.

SCHAC defines and promotes common schemas in the field of higher education to facilitate inter-institutional data exchange. The SCHAC directory schema is not oriented to any particular technology. It defines a set of attributes to describe individuals in academic and research institutes. These definitions assume that other attributes describing individuals are already available and properly coded in agreement with the current standards, such as eduPerson schema 200806.

A contract between TERENA (Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association) and Comodo CA Ltd. was signed this week, confirming Comodo as the new supplier of the TERENA certificate services. This is the result of a call for proposals that TERENA issued in September 2008, to procure a managed Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) server certificate service in order to prolong the existing TERENA Server Certificate Service.

Eleven proposals were received in response to the call for proposals. A committee of volunteers from organisations participating in the Server Certificate Service, supported by TERENA Secretariat staff, evaluated the proposals, interviewed bidders, requested and studied additional information and formulated the final, unanimous recommendation to award the contract to Comodo CA Ltd. of Manchester, England, as theirs was the “economically most advantageous” proposal. This preference was announced by TERENA on 23 March 2009. After a legally prescribed waiting period, the contract was signed on 14-16 April 2009.

The third in the series of Next Generation Networking workshops organised by TERENA was held in the Prague Airport conference facility on the 23 February.

Thanks to cooperation with CESNET, the Czech Republic's National Research and Education Network (NREN), some of the presentations were enabled via videoconference, and the session was also streamed live via the H.323 video conferencing system. Around 30 people were simultaneously watching the streamed presentations in addition to the 20 or so in the room.