[ur-wg] Notes from UR-WG meeting at GGF16

[Stephen M Pickles]

These notes from the UR-WG meeting at GGF16 are a consolidation
of notes taken by Laura McGinnis and myself.

Please advise any corrections.

Stephen
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Usage Record Working Group session at GGF16.

1) New Chairs - The current chairs of the UR-WG are no longer active in
GGF, nor as far as we know in grid computing. New chairs are therefore
needed to complete the activities for which the group is chartered.

Stephen Pickles nominated Laura McGinnis, the document editor, to serve
as WG chair. No other nominations were made. The attendees expressed
unanimous support for Laura as chair.

ACTION ITEM: Stephen will post the nomination to the UR-WG mailing list
for consensus, then shepherd the nomination through the GFSG for final
approval.

2) Likewise, the original authors of the Usage Record specification
are no longer involved, and the document needs fresh input so that 
public comments can be addressed. In particular, at least one person
with a solid understanding of XML is needed to take responsibility
for validating the XML schema against the document text is needed.
Donal Fellows volunteered for this.

ACTION ITEM: Donal Fellows will handle this aspect, and serve as an
additional co-author on the document through these final steps.

3) Consolidating the comments: Some comments are duplicates, some are
the result of unclear text or highlight material that just needs to be
emphasized more.

ACTION ITEM: Laura McGinnis will consolidate all of the comments received
and post to the mailing list.

4) Resolving comments: All of the commentors will be invited to suggest
solutions, which may or may not be included in the final document.

ACTION ITEM: Laura McGinnis will forward the consolidated comments to the
commentors and invite them to propose solutions.

ACTION ITEM: All participants who make significant contributions to the
resolution of the comments will be included in the authorship list. All
other contributors will be acknowledged in the contributors' appendix at
the end of the document.

5) Content: The foundations of the document need to be expressed more
firmly at the beginning of the document. In particular, the principles
that guided the design - esp atomicity, delivery independence, e.g. - need
to be emphasized, so that the reader understands the context and focus of
the specification.

ACTION ITEM: Laura McGinnis will draft appropriate text and include it in
the document.

6) Conference Calls: It was agreed that the UR-WG would benefit from a
regular series of conference calls, at least until the comment response
process was well underway. Since most of the current members of the WG are
from Europe, it was agreed that the call should be based there. The common
time of 2pm UTC/9amEST (US) was agreed upon, and Thursday was chosen as
the most amenable day for the group.

ACTION ITEM: Stephen Pickles will set up the conference call and
distribute the call-in information to the group via the mailing list.

8) Timelines: We anticipate that the process of responding to the current
comments, revising the specification, re-submission to the GGF editor,
and 15 day GFSG review will take 4-6 months. Therefore the
revised document should be back into public comment by GGF18.

==================== Stephen M. Pickles ====================

Technical Director, Grid Operations Support Centre
Manchester Computing
Room G49.1, Kilburn Building
The University of Manchester           tel: +44 161 275 5974
Oxford Road                            fax: +44 161 275 6800
Manchester M13 9PL          stephen.pickles at manchester.ac.uk