Message

I have two orders of business. First, I want to make sure that any other appropriate individuals from your organizations are subscribed to this list. Currently, I just have one party from each organization, so if there are others whom you believe should be on this list, send their email addresses to me and I will add them. Second, as promised, I wanted to solicit your support for the recently launched, OGF Thought Leadership Series (www.ogf.org/TLS). Let me take a few moments to introduce you to the series, what is intended to be, and why it is important for you to consider participating.

As you are already aware, OGF is a global community. Individuals repeatedly tell me, via conversation or in surveys, that the primary value of OGF is the networking that occurs within our community. I'm sure most of you have experienced this personally, but not everyone has the funding or the ability to attend OGF events to experience this first hand. Contact with thought leaders and grid experts is something that we want to encourage at our events, but also make available virtually in various ways. One way to extend this contact to the broader virtual community is through this Thought Leadership Series (TLS). The TLS, simply put, is a collection of perspectives from people at all levels of the community (leadership, in the trenches, and everywhere in between) that should be considered, and perhaps even argued, in the broader community. A good example of this was the reprint of Ian's blog on grids and clouds. Ian's perspective that clouds are really grids in slightly different clothing is one that OGF believes should be considered and debated within our community. As an extention of the TLS postings, we've also included a discussion mechanism where people can present contrary perspectives or agree whole-heartedly. So, in summary, we hope the TLS to become a meeting place to discuss interesting and even controversial topics about grids. The success of the TLS will depend on the content we post, how well we engage readers, and how much discussion occurs over the posted content.

Here's where you all come in. We are extending invitations on a regular basis to people in the community that we believe could provide good, thought-provoking content. I know that each of you know of people in your community that could contribute something as simple as Ian's blog entry or other content that presents a perspective that would be interesting to the community. I invite you to not only solicit content from your communities, but also encourage your community to read the TLS content and engage in the dialog. Everyone in our community is busy, so I do not expect 100% participation, but the broader we cast the net, the more fish we may catch. So, spread your net broadly and let's see what happens.

I think it is important for you to understand twotypes of content we are NOT looking for. First, we are not looking for long, technically-heavy, academic papers. We want simple, straight-forward perspectives that are easy to read and digest. Second, we are not looking for pure marketing presentations. While I'm not suggesting products cannot be discussed, we do not want this to become a marketing channel for organizations pushing their solutions.

By way of process, there is a submission link on the URL above or you may simply email submissions to thoughtleadership@ogf.org. Our current "review team" is the Management Steering Committee including Professor Geoffrey Fox (Indiana University), Robert Fogel (Intel), Chris Smith (Platform Computing), Craig Lee (OGF President), and myself.

Steve Crumb
Executive Director, Open Grid Forum
scrumb@ogf.org
+1 312-895-5931 (office)
+1 630-915-3324 (cell)