Allocation of Community Building Funds

EGEE has reserved funds to financially support the community building activities. The total amount of money reserved is 58,000 ¤ and will be dedicated to the following three community-building aims:

• To bring user communities together,
• To expand existing communities, and
• To help new communities make use of the EGEE grid infrastructure.

The funding opportunities discussed below apply only to personnel that are not directly funded by the EGEE project. People directly involved and paid by EGEE are not eligible for financial support coming from the Community Building Funds.

The NA4 Deputy Activity leader is primarily responsible for managing this money. Decisions about who will be funded and when, will be taken by the deputy in consultation with the NA4 Steering Committee. The accounting details for paying the various expenses and making the reimbursements are handled by the EGEE Project Office in coordination with the NA4 deputy leader.

Below is an overview of the fund allocation policies and the procedures to be followed for obtaining funds.

Bringing Communities Together

Face to face meetings are important for the development of EGEE grid user communities. Such meetings are organized either as part of the User Forum scientific programs or in the form of meetings for specific scientific disciplines ("scientific meetings" below) taking place between User Forums.

In the both cases, funds can be allocated for invited speakers to cover their traveling expenses, registration fees and accommodation. Every effort should be made to take advantage of early bird event registration rates, if appropriate.

In exceptional cases, Community Building funds may help cover some of the logistical expenses such as :

• Meeting room costs
• Meeting room equipment (beamer, screens, etc.)
• Participant tags, dissemination material, etc.

for scientific meetings.

Funds Allocation Policy

A total of 24,000 ¤ has been allocated for the above purpose. Since the amount is very small to satisfy all requests that may come in the two years of the project the following overall policies will be applied to the funding allocation procedure:

• Travel expenses for invited speakers will cover a maximum of 1,100 ¤ per person for User Forums and 800 ¤ per person for scientific meetings.
• We aim to support three invited persons per User Forum which gives a total of 6,600 ¤ for both events (UF4 and UF5).
• A sum of 17,400 ¤ will be devoted for the organization of disciplinary meetings. The above amount includes the support for invited speakers. We aim to support one disciplinary meeting per cluster, this gives a rough total of ~2500 ¤ per meeting. A typical distribution of this amount would consist of 800 ¤ for two invited persons and 900 ¤ for logistics.

Coordinating Community Effort

Community building efforts of NA4 have two aims in EGEE-III:

• To expand existing communities, and
• To attract and introduce new scientific disciplines to the project.

Community Expansion

Seven scientific communities are officially participating in the EGEE-III program of work. These include disciplines with established experience in grid exploitation, like High-Energy Physics and Life Sciences, but also other disciplines that were introduced in EGEE-II and have evolved quickly to demonstrate significant scientific results produced with grid technology. In EGEE-III one more discipline was added, Computer Science, via the efforts of the Grid Observatory. The above clusters have attracted a significant number of participants, brought new applications to the grid, developed discipline-specific support tools, evaluated the gLite middleware, and provided feedback to middleware developers for improvements to existing services or implementation of new services. Nevertheless, a large number of European research teams and scientists active in the above scientific fields do not yet take advantage of EGEE infrastructure. Existing clusters are always looking for ways to attract new applications and teams; community building funds can help this effort by covering expenses for people to travel and attend disciplinary meetings.

New Communities Induction

Apart from the seven official clusters, EGEE wishes to reach and attract new scientific disciplines. Such new disciplines include:

• Finance and Economics
• Multimedia applications (Video & Image Processing, CGI rendering etc.)
• Social Science and Humanities
• Material Science
• IC design
• Aerospace Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering

Part of our work will be to identify key persons that could coordinate with NA4 management in order to initiate a new community, to attract members from this community, and to develop first pilot applications. Community Building funds will help cover traveling expenses, registration fees, and accommodation for these key persons to EGEE Conferences and User Forums in order to bring them together with existing communities and support teams of EGEE.

Support for Application Porting

New communities will probably require consultation from EGEE's Application Porting (AP) team to be able to make use of the grid infrastructure in a production manner. For large applications, developers might need to travel to one of AP's specialized centers across Europe (SZTAKI in Hungary, INFN in Italy, UCM and CSIC in Spain) for face-to-face interaction and hands-on development meetings that will speed the application gridification process. New applications from existing communities can also use this funding support when close collaboration with the AP teams is necessary provided they are not already funded by EGEE.

Funds Allocation Policy

A total of 34,000 ¤ will be devoted for community expansion and new community induction efforts. The policies applied are the following:

• Travel expenses will cover a maximum of 1,000 ¤ for inviting attendees coming from existing disciplines in disciplinary sessions organized in either EGEE Conferences or User Forums.
• Similarly, a maximum of 1,000 ¤ per person will devoted for covering expenses of key persons from new disciplines to travel to major EGEE events.
• We aim to fund a maximum of 4 attendees per event (2 from existing communities and 2 from new ones). This gives a total of 4,000 ¤ per event. With four events (two Conferences and two User Forums) included in the project calendar we plan to spend 16,000 ¤ for this purpose throughout the project duration.
• Regarding the financial support for developers traveling to Application Porting team institutes, we plan to cover 10-20 different new applications. For each application a maximum of 2 developers will be supported each time with a total cost of 800 ¤ per person. A total of 16,000 ¤ will be dedicated for this purpose. A given application may take advantange of these funds once.
• The remaining 2,000 ¤, together with potential unallocated funds from the above activities, will be reserved for funding key people from emerging communities or people from existing communities for community expansion to travel to disciplinary workshops held between major EGEE events.

Procedures

This section details the specific procedures that shall be followed, depending on the purpose of funding requested. (Note: in the following text, unless stated otherwise, the term "deputy" refers to the NA4 deputy activity leader).

Scientific meeting organization

1. A request is submitted by the respective cluster workgroup leader that includes the following information:
   • Rationale
   • Location
   • Date
   • Estimated budget
   • Number of attendees
2. The request is evaluated by the deputy.
3. The deputy brings the request for discussion in the next NA4 Steering Committee meeting.
4. The NA4 Steering Committee discusses the request and if accepted the deputy proceeds with the next step.
5. The deputy informs the EGEE Project Office (PO) about the decision and provides contact information of the meeting organizer. Also informs the organizer about the acceptance of his/her funding support and the kind of expenses that will be reimbursed.
6. All organization arrangements and expenses are done and paid by the meeting organizer who, after the event, submits all the receipts and other proofs of expenses to EGEE PO in order to be reimbursed.

Invited speakers for User Forums

1. A member of the Program Committee (PC) proposes a speaker for one of the event's sessions or for one of the plenary sessions (keynote speech).
2. The PC evaluates the request and accepts or declines the proposal.
3. If accepted, the deputy informs the EGEE Project Office (PO) about the decision and provides contact information of the person to be funded. Also informs the beneficiary about the acceptance of his/her funding support and the kind of expenses that will be reimbursed.
4. All the travel arrangements and expenses are done and paid by the beneficiary who in the end of the trip submits all the receipts and other proofs of expenses to EGEE PO in order to be reimbursed.

In the case of keynote speakers, the expenses should generally be covered by the event budget. Community building funds should be used only if the event cannot extend funding to the invited speakers.

Invited attendees from existing communities

1. The community leader proposes an invited participant for a scientific meeting at an EGEE Conference or User Forum.
2. The deputy evaluates the request and makes an initial decision to support it or not.
3. The deputy brings the request to the next NA4 Steering Committee for evaluation.
4. The NA4 Steering Committee discusses the request.
5. If accepted, the deputy informs the EGEE Project Office (PO) about the decision and provides contact information of the person to be funded. Also informs the beneficiary about the acceptance of his/her funding support and the kind of expenses that will be reimbursed.
6. All the travel arrangements and expenses are done and paid by the beneficiary who in the end of the trip submits all the receipts and other proofs of expenses to EGEE PO in order to be reimbursed.

Travel funds to visit the Application Porting team

1. The Application Porting workgroup leader sends a request to fund travel expenses for developers to the deputy, listing the following:
   • Number of persons to be funded.
   • Names, institute and position.
   • Destination and days of stay.
   • Description of application, discipline, target VO.
   • Names and contact information for application representative.
   • Budget estimation.
2. The deputy evaluates the request and makes an initial decision to support it or not.
3. The deputy brings the request to the next NA4 Steering Committee meeting for evaluation.
4. If accepted, the deputy informs the EGEE Project Office (PO) about the decision and provides contact information of the person(s) to be funded. Also informs the beneficiaries about the acceptance of their funding support and the kind of expenses that will be reimbursed.
5. All the travel arrangements and expenses are done and paid by the beneficiary who in the end of the trip submits all the receipts and other proofs of expenses to EGEE PO in order to be reimbursed.

Invited persons from new communities

A proposal to invite a person from a new scientific community can be initiated by the Project Director, Technical Director, NA2 Activity Leader, NA5 Activity Leader, or NA4 Activity Leader. The deputy himself can decide about people to propose based on personal contacts and community building activities in which he is involved.

1. A proposal to invite a person from a new scientific community is sent to the deputy and should contain the following information:
   • Name, Institute and Position
   • Discipline
   • EGEE-community interaction history (how the approach was made, workshops attended were networking took place)
   • What justifies for the specific person be considered representative for the community in question
   • Short description about the community. This should include, references to current use of grid technologies and any other grid projects with which this community is affiliated.
   • List of sample use cases. Aspects of grid technology especially interesting for the community (mass data storage and transfer, HPC, interactivity, remote instrumentation, data security, ontologies, etc).
2. The deputy evaluates the request in consultation with the Project Director, Technical Directory, and NA4 Activity Leader.
3. The deputy brings the request for evaluation to the next NA4 Steering Committee meeting.
4. The NA4 Steering Committee evaluates the proposal.
5. If accepted, the deputy informs the EGEE Project Office (PO) about the decision and provides contact information of the person to be funded. Also informs the beneficiary about the acceptance of his/her funding support and the kind of expenses that will be reimbursed.
6. All the travel arrangements and expenses are done and paid by the beneficiary who in the end of the trip submits all the receipts and other proofs of expenses to EGEE PO in order to be reimbursed.

Expenses Reimbursement

Information regarding eligible expenses and how they will be reimbursed is available from Community Building Reimbursement Policy

Dissemination of Procedure

Audience: NA4 Steering Committee and those interested in application porting support.

The NA4 Steering Committee will be periodically reminded of the existance of the community building funds. The Application Porting Support team will suggest these funds to people who could benefit from face-to-face application porting support.