NGS at the EGI Community Forum, Munich

You can tell it’s been conference season over the past few weeks – lots of travelling, lack of sleep and notes written in cryptic language on my laptop from various sessions and presentations.

The EGI Community Forum was held in Munich, Germany at the end of March and consisted of 4 days of conferencing and various workshops on the Monday morning.  As well as helping to look after the UK NGI exhibition stand, I also attended a wide variety of interesting sessions including:

• Sustaining the EGIInfrastructure
• Impact of e-Infrastructures: Theories and practices ofassessment methodologies
• Community-tailored Services
• Communication: the key to future funding

Each session had its highlights – the EGI session looked at how to count the number of users that EGI actually has.  They attempted to do this through the use of VOMS (Virtual Organization Membership Service) but there were problems with the information contained being out of date or indeed missing in some cases, not all users being registered, expired users still being in the system and many more.  However at the end of the day they did eventually come up with a definitive figure which was as accurate as possible on the day it was calculated – 20706.

Also in this session was a presentation from the German national grid – D-Grid.  They presented on a business model for a sustainable Grid infrastructure.  The slides from this session are definitely worth a look for anyone interested in the next stage of national e-infrastructure.

I also presented on the NGS Campus and Community Champion initiatives at the NGS in the session on Communication.  To save me telling you all about it, I’m instead going to provide a link to a blog post written by Elizabeth Leake who wrote about her take on the session and my presentation.

A big congratulations to the local organisers who did a fantastic job – great venue and great food as well as inbuilt entertainment in the conference venue.  You may have to join our Facebook page to see evidence of this coming soon!

Munich was another great EGI event and we’re already planning and looking forward to the next one which is the EGI Technical Forumin Prague in September.