Dear OGF members, We are grateful for the work you have done over the past year. Speaking personally for a moment, I hope that as appropriate, you have had a great Hanukkah or will have a Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, end of year celebration or whatever celebration is appropriate for your particular choice of faith (or choice not to have one!); it is a true privilege to know each and every one of you. This has been a year of growth of the appreciation of OGF and its role in the standards landscape, and readjustment financially as we deal with more people participating in our activities remotely, less in in-person meetings, and adjustment to the broadened cloud, grid and distributed computing standards landscape. I think that the Big Data field, next on the growth horizon and clearly one in which the OGF community has much to say, is still in expansion but will be in need of our collective talents and skills in bringing community-based tools to that area of work in the near future; fortunately this is an area in which OGF already has a strong track record in related data transmission, interface and format description standards. This note is partly to let you know the following dates that have been put forward by the OGF Board, and of its decision to put more of the responsibility for organizing and bringing together OGF meetings into the Grid Forum Steering Committee and the Standards Council, which consists of your Area Directors. We hope that this will improve communication between the groups in each area and the organizing efforts, and will be a good match to the OGF Board's corresponding decision to base more of our events based on university campuses and other no-risk venues, where we can be sure to carry them out without existential impact to OGF if the event is not within budget. We think that this set of decisions places OGF on a sound, strong footing for the future. As you may also know, Steven Newhouse has decided to step down as OGF Board Chair after years of contributions at that level, and Andrew Grimshaw has agreed to take on this role as his replacement. These are the dates that have been discussed. The first is firm for OGF37 , and the announcement for it should go up on the OGF web site shortly. The rest remain to be confirmed, and this is your opportunity to communicate either directly with us or through your group chair and area director about your preferences, but we would like you to know about them at the earliest opportunity. OGF37 - University of Virginia - March 10-13th 2013 OGF38 - Maastericht, NL, 3-6th June 2013 - collocated with the Terena Networking Conference OGF39 - EGI Technical Forum - September 2013, Location TBC In addition, we expect to have another in the continuing series of Cloud Plugfest events that we have been co-organizing with ETSI and SNIA at or near OGF 37 (still under discussion), and there are several other events in series that have had significant OGF input that will take place, including Cloudscape V in Brussels Feb. 27-28, the OGF co-sponsored IEEE Cloudcom conference series, OGF sessions at the Open Science Grid All-Hands meeting to take place possibly by video (since the OSG AHM will take place on roughly the same dates as OGF37 in another city), and other opportunities for working group individual meetings or sessions during other conference series. Our interactions with the ISGC series have been light this year, but we hope to return on our bi-annual pattern to and OGF event at ISGC 2014 and will be in communication with you about this as needed during the upcoming year. 2013 will also include some other opportunities for Cloud Plugfest developer-oriented events. In 2013 these will include the following, in addition to OGF37 already mentioned: The Distributed Management Task Force Alliance Partners Technical Symposium, July July 22 - 26th in Portland, OR, USA (OGF is an Alliance Partner of DMTF.) The Storage Networking Industry Association Storage Developers Conference - Sept 16-20th in Santa Clara, CA, USA (OGF has a Memorandum of Understanding with SNIA and has worked together with it on the Cloud Plugfests for the past 2 years; opportunities may exist to expand this arrangement.) (The DMTF APTS is occurring on dates also occupied by the XSEDE 2013 conference, but we are not in control of the timing, so will probably try to send people and/or encourage them to attend both events.) Finally, on behalf of the GFSG and Standards Council, I would like to say that we wish you the very best in 2013 and hope that the communication door will remain open (carrier pigeon, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media or direct communication are welcome also!) for your ideas on how we can help continue to tune and improve our interactions with the OGF community. The past year has seen a switch to this leaner structure, the replacement of the OGF Sourceforge-based GridForge with the new Redmine tools, several productive events and a continuing steady stream of OGF documents published in our series. We hope 2013 will prove to be even more successful -- and look for a call for nominations for new OGF Area Directors and other leadership positions in the near future! Yours with deep appreciation, gratitude and respect, Alan Alan Sill, Ph.D Vice President of Standards, Open Grid Forum Site Director, Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing at TTU and Senior Scientist, High Performance Computing Center Adjunct Professor of Physics, Texas Tech University