Dear OGF colleagues, This is a slightly long message that I hope will be full of information. I am writing to bring you up to date on OGF events in the summer and early fall timeframe. Due to an incredible amount of activity on the part of our very active community, there are events that span many different venues in June, July, August and September in Europe and the US that follow hard on the heels of a productive spring at OGF 37 in Virginia and ISGC 2013 in Taipei and the upcoming EGI Community Forum April 8-12 in Manchester, UK. OGF 38 will be split between two different venues, with the networking and infrastructure groups attending the Terena Networking Conference (TNC2013) June 3-6 in Maastricht, Netherlands and XSEDE 2013 to take place July 22-25 in San Diego, California. In addition, there are two other events of interest roughly in this timeframe. TNC2013 - https://tnc2013.terena.org - will be hosted by SURFnet, the Dutch National Research and Education Network, and will be followed immediately with a special OGF/GLIF working meeting to take place Thursday afternoon June 6 and Friday morning June 7 in the same venue. We expect a very large portion of our networking community to take advantage of this opportunity and to be present for these multiple events. In addition, many topics in Maastricht to be covered by TNC2013 are of interest to our Federated Security and identity management working groups. There are discussions taking place about a special meeting there, or a gathering of OGF attendees who will also be present at TNC2013. If you are interested in the latter topics, please contact our Security Area Director, Jens Jensen. We expect this to be an extremely attractive venue for those interested in the specific topics covered by the TNC. XSEDE 2013 - https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede13 - will be the location for the bulk of the rest of the OGF 38 meetings. The XSEDE conference will be a large, richly varied one with events covering the range of tutorials, keynotes, student presentations of papers and posters, a visualization showcase and extensive job fair, biosciences day, events on scientific gateways, and a variety of science, technology, and Education/Outreach tracks. OGF meetings will have their own track and it will be possible for OGF attendees to participate in XSEDE track sessions and vice versa. This is a premium scientific event that should serve as a venue for direct engagement between OGF and important elements of our constituent and user communities. We strongly recommend that you register for either or both of the above portions of the OGF 38 event and take advantage of these extremely attractive opportunities to interact with your colleagues. Organizers at each of these events will be on hand to coordinate the OGF sessions and to help you interact with your OGF colleagues in an organized manner as we make progress on OGF work group tasks and items. These events will be followed by two other smaller but hopefully also very productive related activities of the community that are co-sponsored by OGF. The first of these is the next in our continuing series of Cloud Plugfest events - http://cloudplugfest.org - that will take place at the DMTF Alliance Partners Technical Symposium (APTS) July 22-26 in Portland, Oregon. While the first portion of this week overlaps with XSEDE 2013, remote options for attendance will be available, and the week will conclude with interoperability demonstrations that will highlight the progress of DMTF in achieving interoperability of its specifications with those of other standards organizations with which we also have ongoing interoperability demonstrations. This event will be of interest to our cloud-related working groups and should give a direct opportunity for comparison of work among various cloud-related standards working groups. The second of the summer special events is a special workshop on Autonomic Management of Grid and Cloud Computing (AMGCC’13)- http://acm-cac2013.cis.fiu.edu/workshop.shtm - to take place August 5, 2013 as part of the ACM Cloud and Autonomic Computing Conference August 5-9 in Miami, Florida. This workshop has an organizing committee that includes several prominent members of the OGF community, and is focused on topics of deep relevance to the conduct and inter-relationships between the cloud and grid communities. While the deadline for papers for the ACM CAC conference itself is nearly upon us (March 25), there is still a considerable window for submission of papers to the AMGCC’13 workshop, with papers due April 30, 2013. Please look over the topics of the workshop at http://htcaas.kisti.re.kr/index.php/AMGCC13 and consider a submission. Finally, it is not at all too early to make your plans and mark your calendars for the fall! OGF 39 will take place at the EGI Technical Forum September 16-20 in Madrid, Spain and will also be the location for another in our series of Cloud Plugfest interoperability events. This event will bring together a huge range of technical and implementation projects along with a community of users in a rich variety of topics. OGF has recently concluded negotiations with ETSI, SNIA and the OCEAN interoperability project to host a Cloud Plugfest as part of a joint Cloud Interoperability Week to take place at and be co-located with the EGI TF. We also expect to carry out a full OGF event there, with working group meetings and interactive demos and tutorials, and community events to take full advantage of the opportunity to interact with the EGI technical community. This should be a large and active event. We will keep you apprised of web sites and deadlines as they become available. For those of you in portions of the globe that are not covered by the above events, we invite information on opportunities to locate a full OGF or events and workshops that we can draw to the attention of the community that can give us opportunities to gather to pursue productive work on topics of interest. Please help us keep our calendar as full as the upcoming months promise to be! Best regards, Alan Sill VP of Standards, OGF on behalf of the GFSG