February 2004
New working groups to advise ORION
ORION is stepping up its outreach to the network user community by soliciting the community's involvement in a number of new working groups to advise ORION on several key aspects of the new network.
Speaking to user institution representatives at ORION's annual Technical Forum on Feb. 24, ORION Project Director Sam Mokbel announced the network hopes to work with the user community to help establish working groups that will focus on such areas as the deployment of new applications and services over the network.
"We are absolutely committed to soliciting the input of our user community," he said. "The involvement and contribution of these groups and the user community are essential, especially in the deployment of new services and applications, such as VoIP, disaster recovery and other advanced services."
Mokbel will lead a new ORION Technical Committee that will advise ORION on operational and technical matters, such as broad technical strategies, network design, and operations issues. ORION may also turn to the committee to participate in product or vendor evaluation panels and communicate some of their own user requirements to the rest of the committee.
Another group - the ORION User And Applications Forum - will provide advice on ORION user issues/concerns as well as "business" and applications requirements. This group is expected to provide leadership to a number of project-specific working groups that may be struck, including groups that may focus on such areas as disaster recovery, network backup, grid computing and large scale data resources.
ORION President and CEO Phil Baker also launched the invitation for the user community involvement at a Feb. 20 meeting of the Association of Computing Services Directors.
He noted that ORION is moving to establish a new ORION Strategy Reference Group, that may meet once or twice a year, with representation from key users of the network, R&E network colleagues, the research community and the private sector. Its mandate will be to provide input into ORION's long range planning and focus on strategies for engaging and supporting research and innovation activities.
Part of ORION's broad outreach is continued regular liaison meetings with key stakeholder organizations such as ACSD and similar organizations representing the college and school board communities, key funding agencies, and government departments and agencies. ORION also expects to host an annual conference and workshop, with the participation of user institutions and partner organizations.
ORION expects to have the working groups in place by June, 2004.
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