[wg-all] Important Update on recent OGF activity

[Steven Newhouse]

Dear OGF Colleagues,

The last 6 months have seen a number of changes in OGF that we need to
bring you up to date with,

1. Joel Replogle: After many years of dedicated work within OGF Joel
left OGF at the end of July 2012 for a new position within a
different standards community. We wish him well and thank him for all
of his work over the years and being one of the main regular public
faces of OGF.
The tasks previously undertaken by Joel (event organisation, IT support,
membership, finance, administration, public relations) have been
redistributed to part-time OGF staff (covering finance, administration
and IT) and senior members of the community. Any OGF event organisation
will now be undertaken by the local host (generally an organisation within
the OGF community) or the existing conference secretariat if we are a track
in a community meeting (see the next point for details).

2. Event Strategy: At the townhall meeting in Chicago we discussed how
OGF would evolve its event strategy. Instead of joint events (such as
the OGF 35 in Delft and OGF 36 in Chicago) we would move to holding
events under our own control (such as the upcoming OGF37) or as
co-located tracks in relevant community events. More announcements
will be made about these soon. Our next event will be OGF37 at the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA, 10-13th March 2013 -
more details soon.
This will not change the event structure from a participation
perspective (apart from possibly lowering the fees), but will reduce
the financial risk and the organization overhead for OGF.

3. Restructuring. Those of you who have been with GGF and OGF for many
years that as we scaled up we moved from a single steering group to a
Board of Directors complemented by standards and community councils to
name a few. Our activities within OGF have now focused down to just a
few active areas within the standards council which can now be managed by
a single group. Therefore the Board will reduce its role to just that is needed
to meet our legal requirements as a non-profit organisation (with
at least a chair, treasurer and secretary) and all event planning and
strategy discussions will take place in the Standards Council
(previously known as the Grid Forum Steering Group - GFSG).

4. Leadership. The new strategy and structure is also coinciding with
a change in leadership activities. I will be stepping down as the
Chair of the OGF Board as it comes to its end in the current form.
Andrew Grimshaw has agreed to take on the role of Board Chair in its
new minimalist form so as to discharge its legal supervision of the
OGF organisation. Alan Sill has agreed to continue his role of
coordinating the standards activity through the GFSG.

5. Finances. The concentration of our community activities into just a
few active areas means that our events are a lot smaller than they
were previously - but potentially just as if not more productive - and
we have had to adjust our business model accordingly. This was
previously based around both organisational membership fees and event
revenue but allowed us to support a number of staff working full and
part time. The new event strategy and other changes that have taken
place over the last 18 months means that are operation costs are much
lower and can be supported by our current organisational membership
and event revenue.
These changes have put stabilised our income and expenditure and made
future OGF operation sustainable and will allow us to expand our activities
from this stable base.

5. Community. So what do all these changes mean? OGF has always been
driven by its community and its members. Our goal remains to enable
you to find community consensus in the standards that you need to
build interoperable services that provide access to distributed
computing infrastructures of all shapes and forms. This has not and
will not change. Your support and engagement is needed just as before.
Either as an active group member, leading a technical activity as a
working group chair, or helping to drive the future direction of the
organisation as an Area Director.

I would encourage you to continue your contributions at all levels and
to continue to grow the number and variety of OGF activities and
standards.

Steven Newhouse
Chair, OGF Board