[saga-rg] Research Group / Working Groups

[Tom Goodale]

Hi,

We discussed the research group/working group structure on today's call, 
present were myself, Andre, Shantenu, Thilo, Pascal and Hartmut.

The consensus was to go down the umbrella research group with spawned working 
group road.

To be concrete:

We propose to split the current RG in two:

SAGA-RG:

    This research group will be responsible for deciding look and feel of
    the API, identifying new SAGA subsystems which we should/might want to
    have APIs for, spawning working groups to look into them (e.g. after a
    design team has come up with a straw-man), and coordinating the
    resulting working groups.  It could look into issues with OGSA
    alignment, or work with OGSA to spawn a group to look into common
    issues.

    This group will inherit the current charter, but remove the API document
    deliverables and add some text describing the new scope, the process for
    spawning working groups, and the relationship between the RG and the
    groups.

Proposed chairs:  Tom Goodale, Shantenu Jha, Thilo Kielmann

SAGA-CORE-WG

    This group will concentrate on producing an API document from the
    current strawman.  It will inherit the current charter, but removing the
    use case and requirements document deliverables.  The charter will be
    refined to specify precisely the areas covered by the strawman as the
    scope of the WG, and will define how it relates to the RG.  The timeline
    for producing the API documents will be unchanged.

Proposed chairs:  Tom Goodale, Andre Merzky

Note that the chairs proposed above are just suggestions, and will need to be 
ratified by the group.  If anyone else would like to become a chair, or if 
anyone has an issue with the proposed chairs, please don't hesitate to speak.

This reorganisation will hopefully produce a clear delineation of the roles of 
the research group and the working group, and provide a mechanism for us to 
spawn more working groups to look at other subsystems such as GridCPR and 
GridRPC, or start SAGA activities within such groups if that would be 
appropriate.  Creating new WGs in this way would, we hope, make it easier for 
people to engage in the process of defining new APIs, and provide a much 
clearer process for the generation of these APIs.

We do have some worries, though, which we need to discuss before finalising on 
this route:

1) Will the additional admin overhead be worth the gain ?

    The feeling on the call was that this approach has potential to get more
    people involved, and worst case, leaves us in the current situation with
    an active WG and an inactive RG.

2) Will this approach really help us to engage and attract new people ?

    We are hoping that the ability to spawn small, tightly-focussed
    groups will help make it easier to attract people and focus them on
    the API development.

We are planning to have another conference call next Wednesday at 1400 GMT 
(same time as today's call), to continue discussion of this, and on Thursday 
wish to send the decision of the group to the GFSG so that they may discuss it 
before GGF.

I know this is a short time-frame, but we need to finalise this issue soon, and 
comments from the wider group are essential.  Please speak up one way or 
another in the next few days as to whether we should go forward with this plan, 
or ask the GFSG to just 'flip-the-bit' as per the original discussions. Any 
other comments or suggestions would be great.

Even a response such as 'no, just flip the bit', or 'go for it' would be 
helpful.

We have assurance from the ADs that whichever way we decide to go, the 
transition will be quick and relatively painless.

Cheers,

Tom