Hi, Sorry for the weird noises on my end. My cab driver nearly rearended the car in front of us in the snow in Geneva. The main areas I can work on would be around continuing some of the aspects of the Athens discussion on moving to collaboration in "production grids." The main way to do this would be to work with the commercial firms that have participated in GGF's previously who have interesting customer adoptions. In Japan, the best bet for this would be to work through Kato-san, one of the keynote speakers in Boston. His firm, Engineous, has some of the more interesting auto, aerospace and heavy machinery/power equipment customers in Japan. Some of these clients could certainly talk about the challenges of collaboration, one of the themes in moving to production grids that we discussed in Athens. A series of panels might include commercial grids and illustrations of research production grids supported by the Japanese and Chinese government. I also proposed a roundtable after this. I think this could lead to a broader discussion, but it is a format we have not used. I would propose three customers, two software vendors, one or two standards participants. I think these two efforts would support efforts to get the attention of more vendors and commercial users. It may also be possible to go to IBM, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, Oracle and others to suggest customers that they believe illustrate some of the themes we would like to discuss. I doubt this could be a vendor forum because firms would be reticient about criticizing their main vendors. Sekiguchi, I and others know the people to contact. If we do a VAF, we would be more likely to get IBM, the Japanese vendors, SAS, and Platform. The big question is whether we could get some of the firms that are not so convinced GGF offers them much, such as Datasynapse. Bob Steve Crumb wrote:

Community Council Members,

Robert is traveling this week (penance for being gone a week in Athens) and has asked that I help with the Community Call tomorrow (Tuesday).

Robert would like us to discuss the following:

1. GGF17 Community content. I identify the key community attendees that we need to target, then propose content from each area to target those attendees.

2. VOCs EU groups for GGF17. Which ones do we want to target, e.g. finance, research/academic, etc. Who will own driving each for GGF17. We need to write simple charter for VOCs (maybe one charter for all VOCs) to identify what it is and the objectives, e.g. identify requirements and use cases, drive into stds, etc.

3. VAF (Vendor Adoption Forum) for GGF17. Which vendors can we start to target, e.g. MS, Platform, IBM, SAS, SAP, etc. Who will own driving this for GGF17. We need to write simple charter for to identify what it is and the objectives, e.g. identify key vendor requirements for adoption and issues that impede adoption, then drive into stds, etc.

4. GGF16 report. Key takeaways of each Community session. Next steps for each session. Suggestions for GGF17 and beyond.

If any of you have other items to discuss, please email me and I'll put it on the agenda.

The call is at 10am US Central time and the dial-in information is:

US: 888-455-3044 Intl: 210-839-8611 Pass Coode: 34743

By the way, Julie's last day was last Friday and I'm actively pursuing a replacement. If you know of someone that is looking, please let me know.

Thanks,

Steve Crumb Executive Director, GGF scrumb@ggf.org +1 630-252-8610 +1 630-915-3324 (cell)