TERENA’s future activities to promote end-to-end service provisioning will be less about technology and more about the service aspects and getting closer to user communities. This is the outcome of a series of BoF (Birds of a Feather) consultations at major research networking conferences throughout 2011. A new TERENA document on “How to Support the TERENA Community on End-to-End Networking” is now available for download at http://www.terena.org/activities/e2e/e2e-strategy-v1.2.pdf

New challenges are related to multi-domain service development, rather than a technology roadmap. In collaboration with the GN3 (GÉANT) project, Internet2 and GLIF, TERENA will organise in the first half of 2012 a workshop for campus networkers on lightpath services. News on this event will be posted shortly.

Pierre Bruyère (Belnet) is no stranger to the research and education networking community. With almost 30 years of experience in various related functions, it comes as no surprise that he was recently elected by the General Assembly as President of TERENA, succeeding Janne Kanner (CSC), who completed a two-year term.

Following his first TERENA Executive Committee (TEC) meeting on 30 June as President of TERENA, Pierre sat down to provide more insight into his professional experience and to explain his views about the association’s future goals.

On 13 June, 2011, TERENA celebrates its 25 year anniversary as the association of national research and education networking organisations (NRENs) in Europe. TERENA looks back at an eventful history - many new concepts have been introduced within the TERENA community, including middleware and customer-owned dark fibre as well as the development and launch of eduroam.

With an eye to the future, TERENA marked its contribution to collaboration in the research networking community with a contest in which participants were asked to predict how the Internet will impact people’s lives in the next 25 years. A challenging future lies ahead for the community, with mobility, cloud services and lambda networking becoming increasingly important. TERENA looks forward to offering its members and the wider research networking community a forum in which to address these and other challenges together.

The fundamental challenge of the last mile of End-to-End (E2E) connection services should be the main focus of future discussions, concluded participants at the last TERENA E2E Provisioning Workshop, held on 29-30 November, 2010 in Prague, Czech Republic and hosted by CESNET. Despite the early winter snowfall in Prague, twenty attendees and eight remote participants discussed the future of the E2E community built around this workshop series, and explored the key applications for emerging user communities.

The TERENA E2E Provisioning Workshop series was established for key players from national research and education networking organisations, and from metropolitan, campus and local networking organisations to share expertise and experience in establishing real end-to-end connection services for universities and research laboratories in Europe. This third and final workshop in the series assembled campus/end-site network operators, national network service managers/administrators and application developers/designers.

Different approaches of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) to develop a strategic direction to continue delivering added value over commodity Internet connectivity providers were debated during a spontaneous and lively discussion at the 34th meeting of the TERENA General Assembly (GA), held in Luxembourg on 20-21 October 2010. The pros and cons of universities, research institutions and NRENs outsourcing the provision of services to commercial companies were discussed on the second day. While addressing TERENA's budget for 2011 and its 3-year financial outlook, the GA agreed that TERENA should study the changing environment of European research networking to achieve a stable financial basis for its activities.

Getting a personal certificate has never been easier, thanks to the TERENA Certificate Service (TCS) portal. Launched on 1 May 2010 as a pilot service, the TCS portal is a shared web-based portal that automatically issues two kinds of personal certificates to users after they’ve been authenticated by a participating AAI federation: a TCS Personal Certificate and/or a TCS e-Science Personal Certificate for Grid applications, depending on the user's needs and permissions.

Since the user's identity is delegated to the home institution, the certificates are issued by the portal with minimal delay. For many users, this will reduce the time to obtain a certificate from days or weeks to a mere 5 minutes, thus providing fast access to protected electronic resources.

Collaboration of national research and education networking organisations (NRENs) with commercial companies and local authorities in providing wireless network access was the topic of a discussion at the TERENA General Assembly meeting in Bucharest on 22-23 October 2009. The main decisions in the meeting, which was hosted by RoEduNet, the Romanian national member organisation of TERENA, concerned financial matters.

TERENA Treasurer Lajos Bálint presented the Executive Committee's proposal for the 2010 budget, as well as a three-year financial prognosis. In contrast with the anticipated deficit in 2009, the next three years are expected to produce small financial surpluses. After some discussion, the General Assembly unanimously adopted the proposed budget. Because of current financial problems of some TERENA members caused by the worldwide economic crisis, it was agreed not to raise the membership fees, despite ongoing inflation.

For the first time in six years, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA) has a new president. Dorte Olesen (UNI·C, Denmark) handed over the role to Janne Kanner (CSC/Funet, Finland) following his election during a TERENA General Assembly meeting last week, Thursday 11 June 2009.

Speaking in recorded interviews, the former and new presidents expressed their views about the association’s achievements and future goals.

As the TERENA Networking Conference wound down to its fourth and final day, participants were treated to various presentations that illustrated how robust technology can result in more possibilities for mobile computing, identity federations and web services.

The intricacies of planning a major research network and of understanding evidence for global climate change were the topics of the plenary session at TNC 2009 yesterday, Wednesday 10 June.

“Thanks for keeping our science in business by keeing the data flowing,” began Stefan Rahmstorf of Potsdam University. He presented an overview of evidence for anthropogenic climate change and said that recent observations show that earlier climate change predictions were too optimisitic. Even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, atmospheric warming cannot be reversed, only slowed and possibly stopped, he said.