Meeting were run back-to-back, so there is only one set of minutes.

Grid User Services Research Group, 10/16/02
GGF-6, Chicago

Attendees: John Towns (NCSA & NLANR), Alistair Mills (RAL), Jim Guiliani (Ohio SC), George Myers (NASA/Ames), Jim Ferguson (NCSA & NLANR), Brian Homrich (Datasynapse), Yutaka Kudo (Hitachi), Marian Bubak (ACC Cyfronet)

• John Towns initiated the meeting with introductions, plus an administrative update on the status of the group in the eyes of the GGF Steering Committee.   The Production Grid Management group, a new group at the GGF, has been formed as a Research Group.  Towns attended one of the new group's meetings earlier in this Forum, and they intend to be "complimentary" to the Grid User Services RG.

• The Steering Committee is concerned that documents in development are not advancing fast enough, and more effort needs to be put into the documents in between meetings.

• New members were brought up to date on the history of the group, and trying to encourage more participation (outside of the European meetings) of European and Asia/Pacific region members.

• Rundown of the documents currently in progress:

• User Services Common Practice - nearly complete, Towns making some minor mods before submittal as a final document to the next GGF meeting.

• Grid Constitution - George Myers leading, we are nearly finished and need just a bit more content to be added.  Possible final document for the next GGF meeting, worst case will be a final review session.

• Trouble Ticket Interchange - previous volunteer author has had health issues since last GGF in Edinburgh, and also will not be getting support to attend GGF in the future, so we need a new author.

• Services and Tool Requirements - not very far along, and previous volunteer author has had to resign due to workload.  We need a new author.

• Jim Guiliani volunteered to be the new lead author on the Services and Tool Requirements document.  This document will deal with tools and services needed by *support staff* in their everyday dealing supporting users on the Grid.
  

• The Trouble Ticket Interchange document was left vacant for now.  Hopefully we can identify a new volunteer from the readership of these notes...or we may end up pushing this document to the Production Grid Management group.
  

• George Myers commenced a discussion of the Grid Constitution document, on which he is the lead author.  Discussion started with the current state of the document, and its organization was explained to those who had not seen it before.  Discussion of the Intellectual Property bullet (2.3) and its origin & importance.  Towns to provide the portion of the Alliance subcontracts that address this issue for inclusion in the document.
  

• Alistair opined that lack of detail in some of the issues listed (like IPR) in the Grid Constitution doc is actually just fine, as it should mostly function as a 'template' for other to take and attach importance to each section as applies to their current context.

• Section 3 was discussed, along with the questions submitted regarding that section.  George will be converting some of the questions to the outline.  A discussion about leaving the "question forma" in the doc, or converting it over to fully statement-based doc.  There are good reasons to leave some sections in question format, because the sections make more sense in that context.  Or perhaps we will add questions to each other section as we think are required.  Document might be more practically useful' written with questions for the reader to consider.

• Alistair volunteered to give George an example of a real legal-eze agreement  between parties, which will perhaps be useful to point out some areas where local lawyers might be interested.

• The participants thought sections 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 all looked pretty good as is.  This should not discourage and edits from readers who did not make this meeting!

• George will reformat and work in comments to section 3, send edited version to the group and then set up a conference call to review what he has done.  Target for the call will be sometime after SC02, and before Christmas holidays.
  

• Need to clarify deliverables for the various documents in the Mission statement.  Need to have meeting minutes up on web site within 2 weeks.

• Some discussion on sharing work on documents with the new Production Grid Management group.