PPARC Grid Steering Committee (GSC) March 8th 2002
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De-briefing Notes         by Andy Lawrence

(0) Although the AstroGrid Oversight Commitee has been created to monitor our 
progress in detail, the GSC remains important as they hold the money, and have 
many influential CS and Industry types.

(1) This was the first meeting of the GSC since our formal project start. It was 
scheduled expecting the AstroGrid Oversight Committee (AOC) to have met the same 
morning and reporting on us. As it turns out the AOC has been delayed to April 
24th, and so Tony and I wrote brief reports for the GSC. (These are on the Wiki 
at AgWiki.AstroGrid.CoreDocs). This turns out to have been a piece of good 
fortune, as we have a six weeks longer to produce detailed material for the AOC, 
and in fact our short reports were praised for their clarity.

(2) The GridPP oversight committee has met however. They were by and large 
satisfied, but specifically criticised GridPP for providing too much 
bureaucratic and financial detail but not enough on concrete work, and for not 
stating clear goals, and metrics by which their success could be measured. 
Obviously there is a lesson here for us in what to give the AOC - goals, 
milestones, metrics of success.

(3) I gave a powerpoint presentation, which I have attached along with our 
reports at AgWiki.AstroGrid.CoreDocs. I didn't repeat the same material, but 
instead gave a SOFT analysis (which I wrote on the plane of course !). Its all 
fairly obvious stuff... hope you enjoy it.

(4) We were actually praised for our progress. This may surprise some of you, as 
we are some weeks behind on architecture and UML diagrams and so on, but seven 
or eight months ago we were seen as ambitious but amateurish and disorganised, 
whereas now we are seen as a well organised project with a good grasp of the 
technology. (But of course next time we will need to show some *real* progress 
!) The architecture-driven/UML etc stuff went down very well with the CS and 
industry types. 

(5) They were still concerned however about whether we are integrating enough 
with the other Grid projects, and the larger Grid world etc. They noted that we 
hadn't yet formed an Advisory Board, and suggested we did need one but should 
concentrate on populating it with e-science/Grid types rather than Astro-users. 
They noted my statement that an obvious risk factor was reliance on technology 
that might not be ready, eg Globus 3 and OGSA, but Tony Hey stressed that we 
should not *wait* for the technology - the point was for us to join in creating 
it. Working closely with DBTF was strongly recommended.

(6) The revised VISTA/WFCAM proposal got a rougher ride. I didn't stay for the 
crucial bit of course, but the questioning was quite tough and it was clear 
there had been some negative referee's comments. My guess is though the GSC have 
little choice but to fund it, but will instruct the AOC to crawl all over it.