Open Grid Forum

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors leading the global standardization effort for distributed computing (including clusters, grids and clouds). The OGF community consists of thousands of individuals in industry and research, representing over 400 organizations in more than 50 countries. Together we work to accelerate adoption of grid computing worldwide because we believe grids will lead to new discoveries, new opportunities, and better business practices.

The work of OGF is carried out through community-initiated working groups, which develop standards and specifications in cooperation with other leading standards organizations, software vendors, and users. OGF is funded through its Organizational Members, including technology companies and academic and government research institutions. OGF hosts several events each year to further develop grid-related specifications and use cases and to share best practices.

For an overview of OGF's approach to its work, please see the summary of OGF Documents and Standards, or view this video of an overview presentation given at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop VIII by OGF's current President, Alan Sill.

You can find out more about the OGF Vision, OGF Liaisons, our approach to Delivering Value, the OGF Board of Directors, Officers, Grid Forum Steering Group (GFSG), Advisory Committee (ADCOM), Nominations Committee, Intellectual Property Statement, or further background using the links in this sentence or at the lower-left navigation menu on any of the About pages on this site.

OGF is an open community committed to driving the rapid evolution and adoption of applied distributed computing. Applied Distributed Computing is critical to developing new, innovative and scalable applications and infrastructures that are essential to productivity in the enterprise and within the science community. OGF accomplishes its work through open forums that build the community, explore trends, share best practices and consolidate these best practices into standards.

The OGF community reflects the near universal interest in and applicability of distributed systems, and includes leaders and practitioners drawn from academia, enterprises, vendors and government organizations. OGF is open to everyone who is willing to participate, to discuss trends, share experiences, solve problems, and develop standards that accelerate the adoption, use and development of applied distributed computing technologies and environments.

Applied distributed computing environments include everything from distributed high performance computing resources (traditional 'Grids') to horizontally scaled transactional systems supporting Service Oriented Architectures to Clouds, across all scales and for all application domains.

Applied distributed computing environments take advantage of many technologies, e.g. virtualization, multi-Core, web services, SOA, etc. OGF will, where necessary, develop expertise in these areas in support of its mission, either through direct activity or through partnerships with other organizations.

By bringing a global community of vendors, researchers, architects and users together within an open forum, business and science requirements can be translated into best practices and, where appropriate, relevant and timely industry standards that enable interoperability and integration within and across organizational boundaries. This process is facilitated by regular meetings, ranging from large multi-track events held several times a year that bring the broad community together in workshops to smaller, more tightly focused group meetings. All OGF activity is underpinned by a web presence that enables communication within the various OGF working groups and the sharing of their work with the broader community.

The Grid Forum Steering Group has reviewed OGF policies with respect to current international and regional data protection and privacy regulations and has come to the following conclusions. As with the policies of many large organizations, these will be subject to review and revision as our collective understanding of the applicability and implications of these requirements evolve, and as the regulations themselves continue to evolve and mature.

To comply with requirements introduced by the European GDPR and State of California requirements with respect to information tracking and disclosure, we are providing to you the following information:

• OGF has a clear intellectual property rights policy in place that governs all contributions and communications. The relevant text, which covers the major points required to be addressed by the above regulations, has been in place since 2006 and can be accessed at the "OGF IPR policy link" at the page linked here. It is our interpretation that this policy meets all GDPR requirements regarding information permissions granted to OGF by all participants in OGF activities. These are clearly spelled out in detail and available to you for your review.
• OGF does not have any current arrangements with business partners or any other external parties that require or enable data sharing. OGF's web sites track visitors for legitimate purposes of security and to allow response to and mitigation of potential intrusions, and do not use such information for marketing purposes. We do maintain records, largely in paper form, consisting of participation and permission records that allow OGF to verify agreement of OGF in-person meeting participants with the OGF IPR policy mentioned above.
• Participation in an OGF email list or other electronic communication by you is also covered by the IPR policy, as explicitly stated on our web site and in the policy itself. This condition was in place from the outset of the initiation of these resources, and does not require a further update to comply with the GDPR.
• The Data Protection Officer for OGF is currently Dr. Wolfgang Ziegler, our Vice President for Community, who can be reached for purposes of responding to any data protection issues at community@ogf.org

Due to the nature of OGF as an open standards and best practices documentation organization, your participation explicitly grants OGF the right to retain certain identifying information, including signatures on the IPR policy agreements necessary for the organization to operate in an open public way. OGF reserves the right to retain this information to comply with legal requirements associated with its document development and assembly process. You do have the right to request access to the information that OGF holds for you, which consists of your membership in our email lists and the permissions granted to OGF by you in past meetings.

You may unsubscribe from any individual OGF email list by following the links at the bottom of any message sent by the list. You can alternatively sign up for, or at your preference, change your email address or unsubscribe from any OGF email list by going to https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo and selecting the list. Each such page includes methods to subscribe to or unsubscribe from the list, get a password reminder, or change your subscription options according to your preferences.