[sem-grd] report from GGF

[David De Roure]

The first morning of GGF included a presentation from the new GGF
Chair, Mark Linesch, on some proposed changes in GGF.  Since GGF12 
there has been a period of consultation with a variety of stake-
holders from the "grid ecosystem" and the GGF Steering Group is 
now making some proposals to improve GGF.  The community is now 
invited to consider these and provide feedback.

The main thing is a clarification of the GGF mission which is then
reflected in an internal reorganisation of the steering group and
an enlargement of the board of directors.  The mission is "leading 
the pervasive adoption of grid computing for research and industry" 
and the proposal is that there will be three "councils" within the
steering group to drive these three functions:

- Community: Building a broad international community for the 
  exchange of ideas, experiences, requirements, best practices

- Standards: Defining grid specifications that lead to broadly 
  adopted standards and interoperable software

- Operations: Ensuring ongoing support of our mission and 
  communication of our progress

In the chair's briefing that followed, Dave Snelling explained that
research groups (like Semantic Grid) are typically aligned with the
community side and Working Groups with the standards side.

These changes represent a significant change in character of the GGF
leadership and I am encouraged that the explicit focus on community
engagement will facilitate the work of our group.

In the interim arrangements, the existing steering group members have
picked up some acting roles - the acting vice chair of standards is
Dave Snelling and of community is Geoffrey Fox (and since Geoffrey is
a Semantic Grid co-chair and Dave is one of our area directors, that 
is a very Semantic-Grid-aware team :-)  As some of you know, I am a 
new member of the steering group - my interim roles are liaison with 
W3C (my W3C counterpart is Philippe Le Hegaret) and also liaison
with the academic computer science community.  We're planning some
new community tracks for GGF14 and GGF15.

Other presentations this morning included OASIS (quite a comprehensive 
set of activities) and an update about european grid activities.

Thanks

-- Dave