Dear all, I am happy to report another piece of good news concerning APPS-RG: During our session at GGF12, we identified the issue that part of our mission is to communicate feedback from the users to GGF's middleware developer community, but we were missing a communication channel for doing so. During and since GGF12, Simon Cox and myself managed to convince GGF's "powers that be" to implement such a communication platform. With a lot of help from Craig Lee (thanks!!!), GFSG has decided to hold a closing plenary at the end of coming GGF meetings (starting with GGF13). Purpose of this plenary is mutual communication, highlighting the most important/interesting things that could be achieved by the groups and areas. (Also, GFSG wants to track progress against an overall roadmap for GGF.) This means that, whenever our group session concludes with important feedback from users to the developer community, all we need to do is convince our own AD's about it -- and we are on stage for a few minutes! Having said this, I'd like to draw your attention to the GGF13 meeting, to be held in Seoul (Korea), March 14-17. (really soon now!) APPS-RG will hold a workshop on "the usable grid", combining success stories from the Asia-Pacific area with some hopefully critical discussions between users and developers. Details will be announced soon. Also, we will have a general interactive session. This one is what we need to plan now. I have compiled a little agenda based on GGF12's session agenda as follows: 0:00 Opening, IPR, agenda bashing 0:05 Status update - new charter approved - document GFD.39, "Workshop on Applications and Programming Tools" has been published - other documents in the pipeline 0:30 Open microphone: Current Issues of Grid Application Development and Deployment 1:10 Planning of future activities (e.g. workshops) - GGF14 (with Earth Observation community???) - GGF15 ??? 1:30 adjourn I'd like to invite your feedback and suggestions. Currently, we are basically open for every suggestion, both for topics for the "open microphone" and for future activities -- or for whatever else might be worth doing during our group session(s) at GGF13. I am looking forward to your response. All the best, Thilo -- Thilo Kielmann http://www.cs.vu.nl/~kielmann/