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
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
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