[wg-all] Early notice re. session proposals for OGF 42 at CAC 2014 Sep. 8-12 in London

[Sill, Alan]

Dear OGF members and participants,

As mentioned earlier, we are planning to hold OGF 42 split across two different related conferences in Europe and the UK in September, the first and main portion of which will be held during and as part of the Cloud and Autonomic Computing conference 8-12 Sep 2014 at Imperial College in London. (The second portion of this will be meetings of the networking groups, in particular the NSI-WG, at the NorduNet conference later in the month.)

We do expect the majority of our active working groups will want to meet at the CAC conference. The location is convenient and easy to get to; the conference is located at a university that is willing to accommodate our requests for working group meeting space, and the conference is also co-located with other interesting events for our community. In particular, this would be an excellent venue at which to discuss our work within OGF on federated security and access models and tools, and related topics oriented towards building participation from the community.

Prior to this, OGF 41 will be incorporated into XSEDE 2014 in the USA July, as we previously mentioned. It is our hope that following this event reasonably closely with another event convenient to our community members in Europe will help stimulate additional work and meetings of current and prospective new OGF groups. BOF sessions will be entertained and welcome as usual. 

We encourage you to think about new activities to take place at both of these events in the spirit of the OGF charter and mission, which is to be an open community committed to driving the rapid evolution and adoption of applied distributed computing through open forums that build the community, explore trends, share best practices, document findings and consolidate these results into standards. We are committed to keeping OGF true to this mission as methods for accomplishing these goals evolve through natural technological advancement.

In particular, the launch of the EGI Federated Cloud announced recently at the EGI Community Forum illustrates that the community that spawned OGF is still working to advance the forefront of applied distributed computing and to bring its efforts to bear fruitfully on problems of interest to our community. We encourage the organizers of the Federated Cloud and related community groups tackling problems of federated identity management, use of standards (including those from outside of OGF as well as those that we develop internally) as well as practical items of software and best practices, etc., to meet at OGF 42 and to take full advantage of the opportunities for extended group meetings including working sessions that this will provide. We also think this would be a great location for a meeting of the OCCI working group and related application groups that are being formed to exploit OGF work in this area.

A formal call for session requests will be issued shortly. Meanwhile, please discuss this opportunity among your colleagues and consider forwarding any requests for special working group meetings, BOFs or other open sessions to us via your area directors or the GFSG, or directly to events at ogf.org or standards at ogf.org

The link for the main conference for CAC 2014 is http://autonomic-conference.org

Finally, let me mention that a nominating committee has recently been formed as a result of conversations at OGF 40 at Oxford, and will be recruiting nominations for specific positions in OGF shortly. Please be prepared to nominate suitable candidates for the positions that the NOMCOM has identified once it announces them; self-nominations are allowed.

Best regards,
Alan Sill
VP of Standards, OGF