[CCGT] Community Activities at Meetings

[Craig Lee]

Geoffrey,

Your analysis raises several recurring themes together.

1) The synergy between standards and community is one of the
    key strengths of GGF.  {I have asked academics why they
    come to GGF (a standards body) and it is because GGF
    is where interesting things are happening.}

2) Meeting cadence can greatly determine community building
    success.  As you say, it is hard to build and keep
    momentum if groups meet infrequently.

3) Regional GGFs.  Travel support is an issue and if there
    were more "local" GGFs, we could perhaps increase our
    routine/repeat participation.  (People would not have to wait
    for GGF to "come to town").  Regional GGFs would certainly
    have a regional emphasis, as determined by the participants.
    Hence, the onus would be on the Global GGF ;-> to integrate
    and coordinate their activities.

This raises the dilemma of no US meeting in 2006.  With no US
meeting in 2006, a significant segment of our constituents may
not be able to participate in a meeting.  But a US regional
community meeting without the standards people will be lacking.

We could do nothing and concentrate on our current plan, or
we could, as you say, experiment with a community-only, regional
US meeting, perhaps partnered with GridWorld.  If we do do this,
we should really target those groups that need to have a US
meeting, regardless of whether they are existing or in development.

Looking at the current groups, this might include HASS, ACE,
GCE, PGS, and UPDT.  The could also be an opportunity for the
Telecom group to get US companies to participate in a meeting,
e.g., the AT&Ts, and the Sprints, etc.  The proposed Reliability RG
had a great BoF in Brussels but then fizzled before getting to
Seoul.  Maybe this could help them get started again.  We could
also use this as an opportunity to organize meetings in areas
such as pharma, NCO, or whoever else that would attend a GridWorld
as opposed to a GGF.

--Craig



At 02:19 PM 8/16/2005, Geoffrey Fox wrote:
>Please comment on the analysis below that is meant
>to summarize my thoughts on what we have learnt so far
>It was requested by Mark at last events steering group call
>Below I view Enterprise as a particular (large important)
>community and so I don't differentiate it.
>
>GGF Community Challenges and Strategy
>-------------------------------------------
>I think the CC (Community Council) has as promised successfully
>developed and executed a community focus for GGF14
>and should probably succeed in similar way for GGF15.
>We have not published as promised a community participation
>guide or charter documents for all areas. (Industrial
>Applications are one where a draft exists)
>
>Let us discuss the nature of community activities and why
>there are difficulties in putting participation and
>charter documents in writing. First note that currently
>at least, all GGF-related community activities are
>associated with GGF meetings although of course
>communities associated with GGF do lots of things outside
>GGF.
>
>Communities are attracted to GGF meetings presumably
>partly due to the effectiveness of organization of an
>event at GGF meetings but other organizations can compete
>here. I suggest that dominant attraction of communities
>to GGF is the synergy between the community event and
>other GGF meeting activities. This synergy comes from both
>standards and other community activities. In particular a
>particular community member benefits from attending other events and
>individuals primarily attracted to GGF for other reasons,
>attend the community event and so enhance it.
>
>Given the synergy observation, it suggests that we need
>to think about the community from both particular
>functional areas as now but also from the synergy point
>of view. The need to have synergy implies
>a) The main role of area director is to to catalyze the
>interest of communities to have GGF related events
>b) The success of the events is partly connected to
>contacting people within given community but also in
>having other synergistic activities
>c) The attraction of a particular GGF meeting depends on
>its geographical area and the existence of both standards
>and community activities or some other synergy as
>explored in 4) below.
>    1) Thus it is doubtful if GGF events outside USA
>    will succeed unless there is effort and people
>    devoted to exploiting geographical synergies --
>    we saw this working in last Korea GGF meeting.
>    2) It is not going to be easy to make events
>    successful unless they have both standards and
>    community components. Thus partnering community
>    with a standards-free Gridworld in 2006 seems
>    challenging as we will miss standards people
>    synergy.
>    3) It is not clear if communities can get
>    momentum with one event per year; it is certain
>    that they need at least one per year. 2006 with
>    at most one event in USA will be challenging and
>    after GGF15 we will be challenged to maintain
>    momentum with the next USA event at least a
>    year away. This is not to say Athens and Japan in
>    2006 will not succeed but rather their community
>    events will have a regional flavor and will have
>    significant input from local people. I discuss the
>    challenge to maintain interest in communities
>    with a USA bias in 2006.
>    4) I think it is important to experiment with a
>    low-key regional GGF event in USA (the mid-west
>    or equivalent such geographically focused event.)
>    This could be community only, held in late spring
>    2006 (six months after Boston), and have a mix of "international"
>    communities interested in a USA meeting then but
>    with main drive from Grid communities in the
>    chosen geographical region,.
>    5) We need to structure the community council with
>    people able to deliver on synergies. We need either
>    directors or advisers able to deliver on geographical
>    synergies.
>
>Please comment
>Thank you!
>
>--
>:
>: Geoffrey Fox  gcf at indiana.edu FAX 8128567972 http://www.infomall.org
>: Phones Cell 812-219-4643  Home 8123239196 Lab 8128567977