The InCommon Federation provides higher education institutions and their sponsored resource partners with privacy, security, and scalability for accessing protected online resources. InCommon is based on the concept of federated access to protected resources, enabling participants to become part of an association of organizations that agree on a set of attributes and policies to exchange information about their users. InCommon is operated by Internet2 and managed by an independent Steering Committee, representing the higher education and research community. By the end of 2006, the InCommon Federation had more than 40 participating organizations.
At the Fall 2006 Internet2 Member Meeting, the Internet2 community demonstrated the interoperability of Shibboleth with the NSF's FastLane online grant administration system. More than 250,000 researchers, students, faculty, and other research professionals use FastLane to efficiently manage their grants and proposals via a secure web interface. During the demo, Principal Investigators at the University of Washington, Penn State University, and Stanford University used their campus-issued sign-on credentials, enabled through Shibboleth, to access FastLane services. The interoperability demo was a first step in a program to establish large-scale interoperation between the InCommon and the U.S. E-Authentication Identity Federation, serving U.S. government agencies, and marked a major milestone in allowing the research and education community to use their existing campus' identities to access essential online federal government resources.