Dear All, On behalf of the Community Council, I am providing an outline of the two program aspects we envision for GGF14 specifically as well as the logistical needs of these program elements: *Workshops - (logistical requirements: 1 room with 50-100 person capacity from Mon-Thurs. Remote access - telecon or AG - would be desirable. Standard A/V.), *Community (or General) Track - (logistical requirements: 1 room with 100-150 person capacity from Mon pm-Wed pm. Standard A/V. Registration waivers.). We anticipate keeping these two elements separate but understand that this is contingent upon availability of space. If necessary, we will intersperse these elements into one track (of increased days). Below, please find the characteristics of these 2 elements: Workshops (Classical GGF Workshops): -Organized by Research Groups and Working Groups, -Workshops reports must be provided within 3 months of the meeting (we will encourage these reports to take the form of a GGF Informational document). -The GROC solicitation process will be reviewed and modified by the Community Council due to time and potential logistical constraints. We would like to do this asap. -GFSG input will be solicited (both on above process and submissions). -Community Council will provide bi-weekly GFSG updates. Community (or General) Track: This themed session would last from 0.5 to 2 days and is geared towards attracting people to attend the whole session and so motivate attendance at GGF (people that would not otherwise attend GGF). This track may contain keynotes, invited or contributed talks, panels, etc. They can involve applications, technology or standards. Examples of topics for this track (pulled from the Community Council email list archives) include: ....................... STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and used to describe parts of education often viewed as weak in USA. I think we could set up a useful STEM community that could have activities similar to those of education part in SCxx. I suspect we could both benefit a broad community and probably compete for various funding opportunities. ....................... On April 25th, I will be talking at a meeting of CENDI which is an interagency group of scientific and technical information (STI) managers from 12 major federal agencies. In DoE this is called OSTI. Together CENDI members are meant to represent agencies covering over 95% of the federal R&D budget. (http://www.CENDI.gov). These are information systems leaders and I was introduced to them as I am helping design of Information Retrieval Grid for federating different federal databases (http://www.science.gov). I think most corporations have such needs for information systems and it could be interesting community. Note that the CENDI Group exchanges ideas and information covering a broad range of themes from policy to standards to technologies that impact or have the potential of impacting federal STI systems. If we had a community track, the GridIR and Portal activities would be very relevant. I will certainly encourage them to get involved with GGF and I realize it would be useful if for each GGF meeting, we identified activities that could be interesting to each of a set of communities we support. We also could collect talks such as the one I will give and list those of interest to each community. ....................... In coordination with the GGF14 Event Steering Council (ESC), we will generate appropriate CFPs, invitations, etc., for the above community program activities. We intend to record our experiences from GGF14 in a 'community perspective lessons learned' document for use in planning future GGF community activities. I look forward to Friday's discussion and hope this provides further background for the community council's role in GGF14. Julie +++++++++++++++++++ ***New contact information as of 16-Feb*** Julie Wulf-Knoerzer Manager of Community Development wulf@ggf.org ph. 630/252-7163 fax 630/252-4466