This page sets out to explain how HEIs that hold an Erasmus Charter for Higher Education (ECHE) can join the EWP network. Organisational units of a given HEI (faculties, departments) or consortia are not allowed to connect to the network separately. Below is a detailed overview of the different steps that need to be taken during this procedure.

The so-called EWP-administrator from the institution looking to join the EWP-network, will need to login to the registration portal where she/he will need to add a signed Collaboration Agreement and add the url to the so-called manifest file.

Procedure

As a first step the HEI needs to undergo a technical admission procedure:

  1. The EWP Admin of the applicant HEI needs to login as a HEI in the registration portal staging environment, a copy of the production environment linked to the EWP development network (please note that if you are not an EWP Admin at your institution or your institution does not release this attribute for you (you can test this here), this step will fail, please contact the ESCI Service Desk);
  2. In this portal the HEI will need to upload a signed Collaboration Agreement determining the terms of use of the EWP (Development) Network and setting the conditions to link the in-house software to the EWP (Development) Network;
  3. Upon the countersigning of the MoU by the EWP Consortium, the EWP admin will be informed;
  4. The EWP admin will upload a link to the manifest file for its testing instance;
  5. The in-house provider performs some automated self-tests;
  6. The in-house provider contacts the ESCI Service Desk with a request for information or guidance (non-student issues) asking to test their APIs with the reference implementation;
  7. The EWP technical team will go through the testing scenarios for IIAs and/or LAs as described in GitHub.


Upon successful testing, the EWP Admin needs to login as HEI in the registration portal. In the registration portal the EWP Admin will need to upload the signed Collaboration Agreement (also see step 1.2.).


The EWP team will verify if the HEI has technical admission. If that’s the case the Collaboration Agreement signed by both parties will be uploaded and the EWP Admin will be informed.


The EWP admin can now upload the link to its manifest file. This manifest file contains amongst other things information on which APIs the provider supports for the higher education institution in question.


Start exchanging via EWP

Upon completion of the 4 steps above, the HEI is added to the EWP registry (this can take some time) and becomes part of the EWP network. The HEI can start exchanging data via EWP in their production environment. They need to use the functionalities provided by their in-house system. 

As part of their obligations, software providers agree not to add additional APIs to their production manifest file before they have released and tested these new APIs in the development environment.

Revocation

One should keep in mind that things can go wrong. When institutions violate the use of the EWP network, there should be an exit strategy. Institutions can report incidents and complain about the quality of APIs of any particular institution, the unavailability of a server, partners that are not trustworthy, etc via the ESCI Service Desk. The EWP Governance structure will try to settle disputes and has the authority to exclude any institution from the production registry if needed. The institution will need to prove its ability and trustworthiness again in the development environment. In cases of extreme violation the EWP governance structure has the competence to temporally exclude an institution from EWP.