Hi Steve, We all appreciate the urgency here ... Craig was an active member before his appointment as Prez and still is active in the discussions and attends our meetings regularly. Some of us have been communicating the need to connect with the community for the past couple of years but those have fallen on deaf ears - glad the survey brought this into focus for the organization. Regards the output, the material is posted on the OGF websites but are not well collated (as in one location) - they are organized by the specific OGF meeting these were collected - actually rectifying this has been one of the topics at our last couple of meetings and in our recent email discussions. We have tried to bring the end-user relevance and use-cases into the standards activities but the standards activities or OGF at large were not receptive till this survey suddenly made this urgent. I have raised with Hiro and other OGSA folks on many occasions that OGSA has never gone back and reviewed (let alone validated) the use-cases as architecture or specs have been done. These OGSA use cases may not fit the mould of the specs coming out but these were "Grid" use cases that really mattered to folks who took the trouble to put this stuff together - we set these usages aside and came up with specs and are now looking for use cases that fit - if these "use cases" to support the specs were important (or widely used) then they should have been documented up front. What happens if the use cases that come up in this small session does not fit the "mould" are they to be discarded too? I don't see how this connects with the community. "Those who do not pay heed to history are bound to repeat it" - I agree with your "look to the future" but that future has to be informed by the past so that we don't repeat the mistakes/missteps. One of the missteps was that we did these "point in time" use case gathering activities and then forgot about them. The Enterprise Council is chartered with making this an ongoing practice. The duplication that I referred to is not in the specific use cases but in the charter for collecting the use cases and user experiences - it would not serve OGF well to start up another WG that duplicates OGSA's charter though their work product could be different (i.e. does not duplicate) - the same thing applies here. I believe that it would serve us well to see how we can leverage the various charted groups in OGF. Anyway, my intention is not to derail your effort but to highlight how fragmented OGF is where we don't take time to respect and support another's charter - this is one of the many key weaknesses which causes the "community churn/confusion" we are seeing in the surveys. I will leave this with one request - please copy the Enterprise council (the ADs are copied on the CC list) on the use cases that you obtain. Thanks! Ravi -----Original Message----- From: Steven Newhouse [mailto:Steven.Newhouse@microsoft.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 11:41 PM To: Subramaniam, Ravi; ogsa-wg@ogf.org Cc: Fogel, Robert; John Ehrig; bcohen@bway.net; Nick Werstiuk; Cheryl Doninger Subject: RE: [ogsa-wg] OGF Use Cases Workshop - Updated CFP Ravi, I'm sure you were at the Town Hall Meeting II in Boston - and for those that were not have read the letter from Paul and Craig in the Grid Connections letter. There is an URGENT need to connect back to the community side of OGF - I include the academic & commercial enterprises and the research space in the community. Firstly, if there is output from the Enterprise Council - where is it? I looked around on the EGR-RG groups and found some material. Some of which looked relevant - other stuff I found did not... Did I miss anything - please provide pointers. Where is the output from all of these events? I do not feel it has fed back into the standards activity - I'm not sure if that's our fault for not looking or the Enterprise for not telling us... I'm really not concerned about what went on in the past - we need to look to the future. Regardless, OGF is at a critical point. We have specs coming out of the standards council that we need to find a route for adoption. Yet the OGSA-WG use cases date back to a set of scenarios that do not seem to align with the way the vast majority of the people I (and others) talk to at OGF are using Grids in their broadest sense. Why is that? This is what the workshop will try to answer. I certainly agree it will not be easy. My experience is that to get good use cases from end-users you need to do this more or less one on one. Hence the reason for the small hopefully intimate venue. This will not be a workshop in the traditional sense.
If there are some specific requirements for this effort, please communicate that to the Enterprise Council we would be glad to incorporate and I would urge as OGF that we not splinter and duplicate activities.
I'm sorry you (and the enterprise council?) see this as an action that is splintering and duplicating OGF activities. If the enterprise council has this information to hand... please let us all know. If it does not then this is not by its definition duplication! Steven