The first morning of GGF included a presentation from the new GGF Chair, Mark Linesch, on some proposed changes in GGF. Since GGF12 there has been a period of consultation with a variety of stake- holders from the "grid ecosystem" and the GGF Steering Group is now making some proposals to improve GGF. The community is now invited to consider these and provide feedback. The main thing is a clarification of the GGF mission which is then reflected in an internal reorganisation of the steering group and an enlargement of the board of directors. The mission is "leading the pervasive adoption of grid computing for research and industry" and the proposal is that there will be three "councils" within the steering group to drive these three functions: - Community: Building a broad international community for the exchange of ideas, experiences, requirements, best practices - Standards: Defining grid specifications that lead to broadly adopted standards and interoperable software - Operations: Ensuring ongoing support of our mission and communication of our progress In the chair's briefing that followed, Dave Snelling explained that research groups (like Semantic Grid) are typically aligned with the community side and Working Groups with the standards side. These changes represent a significant change in character of the GGF leadership and I am encouraged that the explicit focus on community engagement will facilitate the work of our group. In the interim arrangements, the existing steering group members have picked up some acting roles - the acting vice chair of standards is Dave Snelling and of community is Geoffrey Fox (and since Geoffrey is a Semantic Grid co-chair and Dave is one of our area directors, that is a very Semantic-Grid-aware team :-) As some of you know, I am a new member of the steering group - my interim roles are liaison with W3C (my W3C counterpart is Philippe Le Hegaret) and also liaison with the academic computer science community. We're planning some new community tracks for GGF14 and GGF15. Other presentations this morning included OASIS (quite a comprehensive set of activities) and an update about european grid activities. Thanks -- Dave