Hi, We discussed the research group/working group structure on today's call, present were myself, Andre, Shantenu, Thilo, Pascal and Hartmut. The consensus was to go down the umbrella research group with spawned working group road. To be concrete: We propose to split the current RG in two: SAGA-RG: This research group will be responsible for deciding look and feel of the API, identifying new SAGA subsystems which we should/might want to have APIs for, spawning working groups to look into them (e.g. after a design team has come up with a straw-man), and coordinating the resulting working groups. It could look into issues with OGSA alignment, or work with OGSA to spawn a group to look into common issues. This group will inherit the current charter, but remove the API document deliverables and add some text describing the new scope, the process for spawning working groups, and the relationship between the RG and the groups. Proposed chairs: Tom Goodale, Shantenu Jha, Thilo Kielmann SAGA-CORE-WG This group will concentrate on producing an API document from the current strawman. It will inherit the current charter, but removing the use case and requirements document deliverables. The charter will be refined to specify precisely the areas covered by the strawman as the scope of the WG, and will define how it relates to the RG. The timeline for producing the API documents will be unchanged. Proposed chairs: Tom Goodale, Andre Merzky Note that the chairs proposed above are just suggestions, and will need to be ratified by the group. If anyone else would like to become a chair, or if anyone has an issue with the proposed chairs, please don't hesitate to speak. This reorganisation will hopefully produce a clear delineation of the roles of the research group and the working group, and provide a mechanism for us to spawn more working groups to look at other subsystems such as GridCPR and GridRPC, or start SAGA activities within such groups if that would be appropriate. Creating new WGs in this way would, we hope, make it easier for people to engage in the process of defining new APIs, and provide a much clearer process for the generation of these APIs. We do have some worries, though, which we need to discuss before finalising on this route: 1) Will the additional admin overhead be worth the gain ? The feeling on the call was that this approach has potential to get more people involved, and worst case, leaves us in the current situation with an active WG and an inactive RG. 2) Will this approach really help us to engage and attract new people ? We are hoping that the ability to spawn small, tightly-focussed groups will help make it easier to attract people and focus them on the API development. We are planning to have another conference call next Wednesday at 1400 GMT (same time as today's call), to continue discussion of this, and on Thursday wish to send the decision of the group to the GFSG so that they may discuss it before GGF. I know this is a short time-frame, but we need to finalise this issue soon, and comments from the wider group are essential. Please speak up one way or another in the next few days as to whether we should go forward with this plan, or ask the GFSG to just 'flip-the-bit' as per the original discussions. Any other comments or suggestions would be great. Even a response such as 'no, just flip the bit', or 'go for it' would be helpful. We have assurance from the ADs that whichever way we decide to go, the transition will be quick and relatively painless. Cheers, Tom