[I am forwarding the message below on behalf of OGF-Europe] +++++++ Dear OGF Chair, Over the past years, OGF has maintained a student scholar programme where students from around the world could apply for and receive funding to attend OGF events. The OGF-EUROPE project (http://www.ogfeurope.eu/) has introduced an analogous opportunity to allow European technical experts to benefit from this programme as well. The OGF-EUROPE technical expert programme provides a more longer-term support of attending OGF events and working with the community, with financial support for travels of up to 5 experts for up to two OGF-EUROPE events. People who are awarded within this programme should represent selected experts from the community, which are able to push the standards agenda further. We envision at least two profiles of experts. First group has knowledge and experience to contribute to standards development while the second is able to promote adoption of selected OGF specifications. To this end, they should obviously come from relevant areas for OGF. Experts who have not been strongly involved in OGF so far are particularly appreciated. Potential tasks and added value introduced by experts might include providing use cases and requirements, sharing best practices and knowledge, presenting experiences from perspective of software developer and user to standardization groups. Another possible role of experts could be to promote adoption of selected OGF standards through support of implementation, promoting OGF specifications with company's products etc. Alternatively OGF-Europe may fund work in-between OGFs. Expected outcomes might include documents helping to disseminate and adopt OGF specifications such as white papers, guides, and tutorials with examples. Another option would be funding participation in additional F2F meetings. We are addressing this email to you since you posses, as an OGF group chair, the most complete knowledge about your group's needs and opportunities. Therefore, what we expect from you is to send us any suggestions concerning candidates for experts along with tasks they could perform and any extra work that you find useful for a group and that could be funded by OGF-Europe. We will be very grateful for any suggestions. We hope you will actively contribute to this activity since it may significantly support your group efforts and adoption of specifications. Please address all suggestions, comments and questions to Ariel Oleksiak ariel@man.poznan.pl. Best regards, OGF-Europe team