[Tsc] Fwd: Thoughts on the OGF Technical Direction and Roadmap Document

[Chris Kantarjiev]

Dave,

I think it's great that we're having this discussion - I'll throw in my
perspective, coming to OGF from EGA, which had a technical *steering* committee 
(as opposed to a technical *strategy* committee).

GGF has been very much a grassroots, bottom up organization - there was very
light steering by the ADs, mostly in attempting to keep people to charters and
timelines. But before a WG or RG could get started, there was an approval
process - which meant that there was some sort of roadmap or concept of overall
scope of work appropriate for the GGF.

I think that OGF's TSC is an attempt to formalize that scope of work - to
translate the overall goals of OGF (as stated by the OGF Board) into a concrete
technical avenues of interest. The TSC charter says as much in 4.1.

It is also an attempt to drive the standards process more directly (section 4.2)
- providing leadership and direction to the army of volunteers, rather than just
hoping they will do work in the areas that are critical to progress in the world
of grid computing. Rather, the strategy that the TSC delivers is the source of
decisions around "what should OGF work on?" - an active effort to communicate
direction and progress.

Andre asks - "If the TSC writes down a roadmap, who will care?" I think that
everyone in a WG or RG will care, because the acceptance or non-acceptance of
their charter will depend on the degree to which it fulfills items on the
roadmap. This will be something of a culture shock for many members.

As Mark L says in his thoughts about our output document, "It is one of the most
important documents for us to deliver". This tells me that the OGF board is not
content to continue the "business as usual" bottom up structure of the past. The
structure of OGF makes this clear, as well.

That said - I am uncomfortable with the prospect of naming OGSA as the "flagship
architecture". The survey Dave put out showed that the a large majority of
respondents agreed that OGF should have a small number of different
architectural approaches to grid. There has been a moderate amount of ...
dissent about OGSA in recent GGF meetings ("people are building perfectly
functional grids without OGSA - why are we waiting for it?").

In addition, the EGA/GGF merger team agreed on Day 1 that OGSA would not become
the defacto "flagship architecture", and that it would be positioned as one
architecture, noting that most enterprise customers and may science/research
customers were NOT using OGSA or the Globus TK.

To some extent, yes, it makes sense to point in the direction that we're headed
for the transition. I don't believe that includes simply proposing the OGSA
technical roadmap, especially given the disparities shown in the survey results
between the gaps, priorities, and OGSA.

We might benefit from 'proposing' to make it a/the flagship architecture, air it 
out and give the members a chance to comment on that idea. That's different from 
declaring it.

Our volunteers are paid by someone, as Dave points out - someone who has paid to
participate in this organization. Some of those people did *not* choose to be
part of GGF, and have been convinced to join OGF with the promise that it will
not just be more of the same.

Our job, in part, is to figure out how to make that happen - to highlight the
critical issues facing the community, to provide some direction and focus to
solve those critical issues, so the organization can be perceived as one that
produces outputs other than meetings and documents.

Trying to produce a "moon shot" statement is a good exercise. I'm not convinced 
that

 > The Open Grid Froum should commit all its available resources to the goal,
 > that before this decade is out, commercial and academic organizations will
 > build real operational grids using OGSA based components!
 >
 > No other single technical goal will more completely focus the activities of
 > our newly united organization or more clearly define its success or failure …
 > and no other goal will be more challenging or difficult to achieve.

is the right one - nor that it does much to meet the Board's goal of showing 
tangible results in a 12-18 month timeframe.

Best,
chris