Menorca A, Mani P
1Australian Access Federation (AAF), Brisbane, Australia
Biography:
Poornima Mani is a Project Manager at the Australian Access Federation (AAF), where she works with national research infrastructure partners and the GUARDIANS project team to advance Australia's trust and identity capability. She is an experienced project management professional with a strong track record of delivering operational excellence and robust project governance across the technology, health, and education sectors.
Ayana Menorca-Barrenechea is a Policy Analyst at the Australian Access Federation (AAF), where she contributes to the development of trust and identity policy frameworks supporting Australia's NCRIS research infrastructure. She brings a strong background in government policy from the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, including senior advisory roles spanning the New Zealand Space Agency and board appointments and governance, informing her structured approach to policy development in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.
Abstract:
Trusted research collaboration depends on sharing data, platforms and services across organisational boundaries. While technical interoperability is well advanced, inconsistencies in policy and governance continue to limit scalable trust between institutions.
The Australian Access Federation (AAF) brings national and international expertise in federated trust and identity to this challenge. Through the GUARDIANS project, delivered in partnership with BioCommons and seven partner organisations, AAF is leading a coordinated effort to address the policy and governance dimensions of cross-institutional collaboration. Through engagement with participating organisations, AAF facilitates a collaborative review of governance, identity, access and data management policies, supported by the AAF Policy Development Toolkit. The objective is not simply to identify policy gaps, but to understand how organisations approach governance, accountability, risk and decision-making within their own environments.
Through the GUARDIANS project, a key insight is the diversity of policy capability, governance maturity and organisational practice across partners. Differences in policy expertise, formal processes, governance structures and interpretations of what "policy" and "governance" mean in practice often had a greater influence on alignment efforts than the policy gaps themselves.
This work informs the development of a baseline policy suite aligned to federated trust principles while remaining adaptable to local governance arrangements and organisational contexts. Rather than prescribing a single model, it offers a practical foundation for alignment across diverse organisations.
Attendees will gain practical insights from working across eight organisations, a repeatable approach to collaborative policy alignment, and lessons on navigating the organisational realities that shape trust, policy adoption and interoperability.
