[ogsa-wg] OGF Use Cases Workshop - Updated CFP

[Subramaniam, Ravi]

Hi Steve,

We all appreciate the urgency here ... Craig was an active member before
his appointment as Prez and still is active in the discussions and
attends our meetings regularly. Some of us have been communicating the
need to connect with the community for the past couple of years but
those have fallen on deaf ears - glad the survey brought this into focus
for the organization.

Regards the output, the material is posted on the OGF websites but are
not well collated (as in one location) - they are organized by the
specific OGF meeting these were collected - actually rectifying this has
been one of the topics at our last couple of meetings and in our recent
email discussions. We have tried to bring the end-user relevance and
use-cases into the standards activities but the standards activities or
OGF at large were not receptive till this survey suddenly made this
urgent. I have raised with Hiro and other OGSA folks on many occasions
that OGSA has never gone back and reviewed (let alone validated) the
use-cases as architecture or specs have been done. These OGSA use cases
may not fit the mould of the specs coming out but these were "Grid" use
cases that really mattered to folks who took the trouble to put this
stuff together - we set these usages aside and came up with specs and
are now looking for use cases that fit - if these "use cases" to support
the specs were important (or widely used) then they should have been
documented up front. What happens if the use cases that come up in this
small session does not fit the "mould" are they to be discarded too? I
don't see how this connects with the community.

"Those who do not pay heed to history are bound to repeat it" - I agree
with your "look to the future" but that future has to be informed by the
past so that we don't repeat the mistakes/missteps. One of the missteps
was that we did these "point in time" use case gathering activities and
then forgot about them. The Enterprise Council is chartered with making
this an ongoing practice. The duplication that I referred to is not in
the specific use cases but in the charter for collecting the use cases
and user experiences - it would not serve OGF well to start up another
WG that duplicates OGSA's charter though their work product could be
different (i.e. does not duplicate) - the same thing applies here. I
believe that it would serve us well to see how we can leverage the
various charted groups in OGF.

Anyway, my intention is not to derail your effort but to highlight how
fragmented OGF is where we don't take time to respect and support
another's charter - this is one of the many key weaknesses which causes
the "community churn/confusion" we are seeing in the surveys. I will
leave this with one request - please copy the Enterprise council (the
ADs are copied on the CC list) on the use cases that you obtain.

Thanks!

Ravi


-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Newhouse [mailto:Steven.Newhouse at microsoft.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 11:41 PM
To: Subramaniam, Ravi; ogsa-wg at ogf.org
Cc: Fogel, Robert; John Ehrig; bcohen at bway.net; Nick Werstiuk; Cheryl
Doninger
Subject: RE: [ogsa-wg] OGF Use Cases Workshop - Updated CFP

Ravi,

I'm sure you were at the Town Hall Meeting II in Boston - and for those
that were not have read the letter from Paul and Craig in the Grid
Connections letter. There is an URGENT need to connect back to the
community side of OGF - I include the academic & commercial enterprises
and the research space in the community.

Firstly, if there is output from the Enterprise Council - where is it? I
looked around on the EGR-RG groups and found some material. Some of
which looked relevant - other stuff I found did not... Did I miss
anything - please provide pointers. Where is the output from all of
these events? I do not feel it has fed back into the standards activity
- I'm not sure if that's our fault for not looking or the Enterprise for
not telling us... I'm really not concerned about what went on in the
past - we need to look to the future.

Regardless, OGF is at a critical point. We have specs coming out of the
standards council that we need to find a route for adoption. Yet the
OGSA-WG use cases date back to a set of scenarios that do not seem to
align with the way the vast majority of the people I (and others) talk
to at OGF are using Grids in their broadest sense.

Why is that? This is what the workshop will try to answer. I certainly
agree it will not be easy.

My experience is that to get good use cases from end-users you need to
do this more or less one on one. Hence the reason for the small
hopefully intimate venue. This will not be a workshop in the traditional
sense.

> If there are some specific requirements for this effort, please
> communicate that to the Enterprise Council we would be glad to
> incorporate and I would urge as OGF that we not splinter and duplicate
> activities.

I'm sorry you (and the enterprise council?) see this as an action that
is splintering and duplicating OGF activities. If the enterprise council
has this information to hand... please let us all know. If it does not
then this is not by its definition duplication!

Steven