I believe the community groups could be benefited by a system similar to “Microsoft Passport”. Free software would keep track of user accounts. Then systems like NoCat could query this system for access.
NoCat in captive mode, I’m told, does this already for more proprietary systems such as radius. The gateway software could have a list of authoritative ’single signon’ servers so that gateways could allow people from different groups.
Sun is promoting an XML schema called the Security Assertions Markup Language, SAML. There is an article about it here:
http://java.sun.com/features/2002/05/single-signon.html
I’m sure people have thought of this before, I figure its worth bringing up again. It could expand well beyond nocat, into such things as logging into websites, or even unix logins.
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