Seventh framework programme

Overall strategy and general description

The Networking activities presented in the following sections are designed to:

2. 
   Ensure the management of the project and its consortium;
   

2. 
   Provide appropriate dissemination of EGEE-III’s goals and achievements throughout the course of the project, ensuring the project is made attractive to potential users of the Grid infrastructure;
   

2. 
   Provide an effective training service to new user communities and guide them in their use of the infrastructure;
   

2. 
   Work closely with the user communities, established and new, to ensure their requirements are addressed in a timely and effective manner; helping applications to get started and bridge towards a sustainable model with education and training;
   

2. 
   Coordinate internal cooperation efforts, standardisation and policy work with similar projects and initiatives;
   

2. 
   Provide an effective business programme to attract commercial users and ensure appropriate technology transfer.
   

These activities will work in concert to increase and expand the user base and the uptake of Grid technology in the European Research Area. Work on the long term sustainability of the Grid infrastructure will be carried out through this programme covering dissemination, training, application support, policy work and related efforts both in Europe and worldwide and via interactions with business.

EGEE’s networking activities play an important role in the virtuous cycle described in Section 1.1. New user communities are being attracted by NA2, trained by NA3 and supported by NA4 to ensure their successful exploitation of the EGEE infrastructure. This is complemented by policy work and coordination with collaborating projects as well as the technology transfer programme that will attract business users.
EGEE’s business outreach programme will be part of the dissemination activity (NA2) through dedicated, specific tasks, taking into account the different approaches required when interacting with businesses as compared to academia. This will particularly boost EGEE’s technology transfer activities already started in EGEE-II through the EGEE Business Associate (EBA) programme that attracted companies such as GridwiseTech, NICE, and Platform Computing. Negotiations with other companies (Avanade, Excelian, Hitachi) are underway. EGEE will continue to collaborate with CERN’s openlab programme, a collaboration between CERN and IT vendors (including HP, Intel and Oracle) to develop data-intensive Grid solutions, which also provides an excellent forum for technology transfer.
Close relations with the EGI_DS project will be fundamental to fulfil EGEE-III’s goal of moving towards a sustainable infrastructure. Such interactions will be made through the NA1 and NA5 activities, as well as joint planning for transition of the outreach, training, and user support programmes.
The interactions and interdependencies between the Networking Activities in EGEE-III are shown in the PERT chart below.


Figure : PERT chart of the NA activities in EGEE-III

Timing of activities and their components

Activities list/overview

Activity Number	Activity Title	Type of activity	Lead beneficiary Number	Lead beneficiary Short name	Person Months	Start Month	End Month
NA1	Management of the Consortium	MGT	1	CERN	168	1	24
NA2	Dissemination, Communication and Outreach	COORD	1	CERN	420	1	24
NA3	User Training and Induction	COORD	33	STFC	737	1	24
NA4	User Community Support and Expansion	COORD	13	CNRS	1763	1	24
NA5	Policy and International Cooperation	COORD	23	GRNET	112	1	24
	TOTAL				3200