General idea.

It seems obvious that global VO efforts have to merge in the long term. In the long term, we hope that many VO and VO-like projects around the world will join together. In the short term, the three major funded projects (AstroGrid, AVO, and US NVO) have formed an Alliance. We are commited to working together, but also hope that this alliance will form the nucleus of an eventual worldwide collaboration. Collaboration between NVO, AVO, and AstroGrid has so far taken three forms :

Frequent Executive Telecons.

The Executive members of the three projects have started a series of international telecons on a roughly monthly basis. Minutes from the March and May 2002 telecons are appended below. The next joint executive meeting will be in June 2002 during the Garching conference.

Grass Roots collaboration.

• We encourage members of the various projects to join in the various discussion fora. AstroGrid has these Wiki pages and also a Forum web page. US-NVO has topic based e-mail discussion groups which have Web-based archive pages. AVO should soon have similar pages.

• Key problems will need close collaboration on a topic-by-topic intense-burst basis, by joint workshops or similar. The first and very successful example was the Jan 2002 Strasbourg interoperability meeting working towards the definition of VOTAble.

• We are also working towards populating our key committees with representatives from the other projects.

IVOA Roadmap.

We have developed the idea of a joint roadmap, with some general philosophy and some agreed milestones. The aim of this is partly to keep top-level coherence between the projects, but also to make a committment to the international user community at a non-technical level. The first draft was put together by Peter Quinn and Bob Hanisch and is attached below. The roadmap has since been discussed at the IVOA telecons, and version-3 is attached below. This version will be presented at the June Garching conference.

Any comments ? Perhaps I should make a Wiki version so we make suggested edits directly ?

-- AndyLawrence - 06 Mar 2002
-- NicholasWalton - 07 Mar 2002
-- AndyLawrence - 04 June 2002