March 10, 2008 To The OGF Community.
From time to time, all organizations need to take stock of their current situation and reevaluate their priorities. As many of you have no doubt noticed, while the OGF community has been relatively stable, and one could argue more productive than ever, some of the primary sponsor organizations have been shifting priorities. This helped motivate your board of directors to task a "tiger team" with answering the following questions:
. Who are the stakeholders in the OGF, i.e. what is the community? . Why do they build/support/supply Grids? . What are their greatest pain points? . Who do they go to overcome these pain points? . How do our existing efforts map onto the community's priorities? We felt that answering questions such as these would help us understand where we are as an organization and where we should be going. The net result of this effort was shared with the community at the second Town Hall meeting at OGF22, but we also wish to inform the entire community through this letter. The good news is that it is clear that our core community, rooted in eScience and technical computing, is vibrant and healthy. Core attendance and participation in the OGF events and in most chartered groups is stable and has been for some time. A GFSG decision a few years ago to nurture standards that were felt to be high priorities of the community is bearing fruit, as evidenced by HPC Basic Profile et al. However, we are finding it difficult to continue to attract and retain organizational members and the associated decrease in funding is having a negative impact on our overall financial well being and our ability to continue to support our community activities. Seeing this trend, a stakeholder survey was commissioned and the results showed that there is a gap in interests between the core working base of our community and our traditional hardware and software platform sponsors. Generally, our core workers look to their own organizations or communities of interest for solutions to their grid challenges. This makes them a less attractive target for vendors wishing to sell their products and services. The survey also indicated that end users do tend to look to vendors for solutions, but that they rarely view OGF as a place to work on their problems. It is this last point that is the most telling, forcing us to develop our priorities based on the real value being produced within the working core of our community. Specifically, that we are a community that comes together because we share some set of common problems or experiences with respect to grid technologies. We share our experiences to help each other solve our problems. The community is what we are and we welcome all who want to participate, whether they are academics, high performance computing specialists, enterprise end users, platform hardware and software vendors, funding agencies, partner standards organizations and so forth. But the output of the community must be driven by the needs of the community, with prioritization determined by the community. The survey has also helped us understand many of the existing community's requirements more clearly. As a result, the GFSG has highlighted the standards efforts that are of most important to our community. We intend to help shepherd and nurture the development of those standards and to evangelize the value of the standards we have already created to the broader community, many of whom may be outside of the OGF today but who should find value in our work and who we can encourage to join us and participate. We also need a clear path forward for our non-standards based community activities. As a next step, we expect a group of senior OGF volunteers to add more detail to this in the weeks ahead. With clear community driven goals we then have the opportunity to restructure to enable maximum success. As a volunteer organization it is imperative that our structure is light-weight, minimizing the effort required to co-ordinate activities, efficient and representative of our community. Returning to the work and priorities of the community is urgent, as is determining a sustainable financial model as sponsor members reduce funding. This means that the community must take more responsibility for its own sustenance. We have three levers that are under our direct control: membership fees, event fees/costs and staffing/organizational costs. We will be examining all of these in the coming weeks and months to arrive at organizational and financial structures that are sustainable. As a first step we have already reduced our staffing by 20%. Additionally, we are increasing the full-week event fees by $140 per person, starting with OGF23 in Barcelona. We have not taken this step lightly, however we have not increased fees in the last 3 years, even though costs have risen. These two steps will help with our financial well being, without the need to further reduce our staffing and place more of a logistics and administrative burden on our community. So that is the state of the OGF, your community, your organization. After a period of introspection, we think we have a clearer idea of who we are as a community and our purpose in meeting and working together. As we move forward we need to refine our structure to support our purpose and we need to modify our financial structure to make us more self sustaining and independent. We hope you feel as positive and committed to this organization as we do. Our core community has been stable and productive for a long period of time and these efforts are designed to ensure that this state of affairs continues for the foreseeable future. Best Regards, Paul Strong, Acting Chairman of the Board, OGF Craig Lee, President, OGF