Dear colleagues, First, Happy Thanksgiving for those in the US and expatriates who are celebrating this family-oriented treasured holiday. I thought this would be a good time to bring you up to speed on some updates and news for OGF. Please take note of these events and of your opportunities for participation. - OGF will be co-sponsoring general Interoperability demonstrations and recording for all relevant projects at the Interoperability Demo Days 11-12 December and virtual Cloud Plugfest 8-12 Dec. 2014 at and immediately after the Utility and Cloud Computing conference 8-11 Dec. in London. Co-sponsors for this event include the Cloud Standards Customer Council, OGF, the US National Science Foundation Cloud and Autonomic Computing Industry/University Cooperative Research Center, the European Grid Initiative Federated Cloud project, the CloudWatch project, and the Storage Networking Industry Association, and opportunities for additional sponsorships are open. The results of demonstrations presented at or submitted through this event will be recorded and made available by Primeur Magazine and by the CloudWatch project. For further information and/or to register to attend either the Interoperability Demos or to participate in the virtual Cloud Plugfest or to present a demo, please visit the CloudPlugfest.org web site and/or send a message to planners@cloudplugfest.org - IMPORTANT: OGF 43 is planned for March 25-27, 2015 to be co-located with the GENI Engineering Conference 23-26 March and Global Lambda Interconnect Facility (GLIF) meeting 26-27 March at the Hilton Crystal City, VA, just across the river from Washington DC. A demonstration event for networking software is being planned, and subsequent Cloud Plugfest and distributed computing interoperability events similar to the above are in the works and in the last stages of being planned. Please SAVE THE DATE for this event and these activities, at which we expect to be able to provide meeting rooms for all interested OGF groups. We would like in particular to promote strong interaction between the federated identity management and certificate authority operations groups, the networking and cloud (e.g., OCCI) infrastructure groups, the applications communities and working production cloud and grid infrastructure projects to compare notes and move forward at this event. We have moved OGF 43 from its previously planned location at the University of Virginia to be able to take advantage of this co-location opportunity. Look for and please participate in (I.e., respond to) a Call for Session Proposals for this event soon. Proposals for future OGF events at an EGI meeting in May, and/or at or near HPDC '15 in Portland in June with several associated events, and/or at XSEDE 2015 in St. Louis in July have been received and are being evaluated. We would also like to recruit offers for hosting for an OGF meeting in the fall 2015 and for a winter or early 2016 location and venue. Please send your suggestions or opinions on these events to events@ogf.org or pass them on through your group leaders or area directors (if you feel appropriate) after discussion. Finally, but not least, please send us your suggestions for new groups, area directors and other OGF positions, areas in which OGF can usefully deploy its resources to organize and document new emerging practices in large-scale utility and distributed computing, or otherwise continue to serve the community in an active way. As a personal and deeply felt note, this organization was built by and for the community and its continuation depends on good ideas, like the ones mentioned above, to remain relevant in the fast-changing world of new technologies. We remain very confident of your inventiveness and in the value of having an open, free, community-based forum based on the best possible principles for documenting and making available recipes for the best practices in distributed computing. Please help us by participating and writing documents and implementations to make this organization that you have built the best possible forum of its type, and write down what you are doing for publication as described at http://ogf.org/documents for the dissemination of your work and the benefit of the community. Please participate in the work and community groups and feel free to suggest new ones for continued useful work and discussion. Best regards for a great holiday for those celebrating, and I hope to see you in London or at one or more of the above events! Alan Alan Sill VP Standards, OGF Director, Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center at TTU Senior Scientist, High Performance Computing Center Adjunct Professor of Physics, Texas Tech Univeristy (On my way to CERN at the moment)