Dear OGF colleagues, We do not normally mail out links to individual national funding opportunities, as these vary substantially in focus and availability, and OGF has a globally-oriented focus. The following announcement is compatible, however, with a long-standing effort that OGF has undertaken to bring information to the attention of national programs throughout the globe about the benefits of using standards-based interfaces in creating and maintaining science cyberinfrastructure services. While this is not, as far as we know, the result of any direct action by OGF, it is consistent with the goals and point of view of our community, and represents an opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of our output and work in a practical setting. We would like to call the following funding opportunity to the attention of our US-based colleagues, and encourage the creation of similar programs in other countries regions. In this case, a modest set of opportunities is being added to an existing national cyberinfrastructure program. I would like to encourage the exchange of information among members of our community on similar programs that could provide support for, or contact with, development of compatible national, regional or global services. Quoting from the announcement linked below: "We encourage submission of proposals to the Strategic Technology for CyberInfrastructure (STCI) Program for modest pilot projects presenting experimental national services to the NSF scientific and engineering community through a standard interface. These interfaces should allow for programmatic access to the service with usage and costs being tracked on a per researcher and per group basis. Proposals should present ideas about how they might deal with cost recovery in a permanent service. These cloud services might be at the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) (for example, compute cycles or storage), Software as a Service (SaaS) (for example, MatLab or ANSYS), or Platform as a Service (PaaS) (for example, Google Docs) level. Services presented should allow for surge capability to draw on additional resources (up to 10x more) should demand spike. This is not a new program. Proposals should be submitted in accordance with guidance found on the STCI program description page." Further information is available at the following link: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12086/nsf12086.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click With best wishes, Alan Sill Vice President of Standards Open Grid Forum