**********************************
                   To the UK HEP Grid community
                **********************************

Re: Technical meetings and training organised by GridPP

Background: This mail is to:

   - remind you (the community) of the current plan for a technical meetings
        under the GridPP umbrella

   - to advertise the next planned meetings

   - to ask for your input on what other forms of technical meeting you
       would find useful


1. PLAN
-------

1.1 At present the GridPP Technical Board (TB) is organising
regular "themed" meetings. In general this means we pick a particular
theme (e.g. resource management, or data management) and organise a
tutorial type meeting designed to inform experiment application builders
what they need to know and how to use it.

The first in this series was actually a general "Application builders
meeting" at
which all areas were covered briefly.

We are doing this following support for the idea at the Edinburgh GridPP
meeting, and subsequently at the "Application builders" meeting at RAL

1.2 In addition meetings will be organised in collaboration with the Sysman
group
to disseminate information on setting up of software at institute sites.


2. NEXT MEETINGS
----------------

2.1 The next in the themed meetings series is

      "How to use the resource broker"

This is being organised by Dave Colling from IC. It will take place on the
Friday of the next GridPP  collaboration meeting in Manchester (9/10 May)


2.2 The next Sysman meeting will devote part of the time to testbed issues

This is being organised by Rob Henderson (Lancaster) and John Gordon (RAL)
and is on the 22/23 April. This has been advertised through normal Sysman
channels

3. Your input on other meetings/training
----------------------------------------

We have taken the view that we will organise any meetings/training which YOU
(the customer so to speak) want. The meetings described above fall into this
category as we explicitly asked you whether you want these to take place.

We have however, as yet, not organised "regular status report" or "show and
tell"
type meetings (i.e. technical meetings where people are invited to report on
anything
they have done recently, but talks are not otherwise linked together). We
have
not done this as there was a feeling from some (not all) that these add to
the meeting burden, and are not specifically useful to what people are
doing from day to day.

That said, it is for you to decide, therefore the questions you are invited
to answer are:

  1. Would you like to have regular  "status report/show and tell" meetings
     as was the case last year?  (these would be in addition to the themed
meetings)

  2. If so would you like these to form one of the days of the GridPP
collaboration meetings
     (as has been customary up to now) or would you like them to be separate
?

     If the latter at what frequency ?


  3. Please suggest any other form of meeting/training/tutorial which you
believe
     would be useful to your group / experiment ?


Please mail all replies to me with GRIDPP-TECHNICAL-MEETINGS in the subject
line.


    Peter

  (on behalf of the Technical board)


Peter Clarke  / +44 (0) 20 7679 3444