Some ideas to implement the proposal about the demonstration of
excellent european science

The main goals are:

- Attract new users and allocate them some grid resources

- Provide users with a simplified procedure to find grid resources for
their needs and by means of a central unique reference point

- Foster a virtuous cycle among ‘new’ scientific communities, EGI,
NGIs, Resource Centers and funding agencies in order to attract new
funding to strengthen and expand the European grid infrastructure
according to the needs of those scientific communities

- Demonstrate to the national funding agencies,EC (and everybody) that the EGI infrastructure and services are valuable, useful and used by a vast variety of different users

European NGIs are different but (almost) all share the problem of the
getting new funding.They also have different procedures to report about
their activities and success. However, supporting the computing and
storage needs of both local and international new user communities is
important for all NGIs, their related Resource Centers and EGI.

In order to reach the goals the first step is to assess the NGIs who are
willing to commit some resources to an European common pool dedicated to
support new users. It is likely that NGIs who have spare resources will
show a greater interest to allocate them to such a common
pool if they will be used by new user communities that are active in
their region (although part of international collaborations).
So, for the success of the initiative it is very important that NGIs are involved in the resource allocation process.

In order to be simple and effective this process should be lightweight
and involve the NGIs/RCs providing resources; it should not deal with the scientific merit of the activities (at least in the first phase).

The procedure to allocate resources to new user communities could be
established as follows.

1)It is established an EGI resource Allocation Team made by volunteer
contributors (NILs?) from NGIs having committed resources to the common
pool. The team meets every month, or more frequently if necessary, to
deal with the new requests. The team appoints a coordinator.

2)Requests by user communities active in one NGI only should be
forwarded by the team to the corresponding NGI without further
work.

3)Requests by user communities that are part of international
collaborations should be examined by the EGI Allocation Team according to the following guidelines:

3a) if users need support to port their applications to the grid, to use
the grid services or they need any other help before being able to start
their activities, a dedicated Virtual Team could be created to address
the request

2b) if users are already able to run their applications on EGI and only
need resources where to run, jump to step 4)

4)Users fill an appropriate (simple) form (to be defined) describing the
amount of requested resources, the duration, the goal of the activity,
the application, the involved groups including eventually the non
European ones, the contest (project/initiative) and any other relevant
information.

5)The EGI Allocation Team sets up a temporary Subgroup, composed by 2
EGI.eu people (one from User Support activity and one from the
Operations) and by one person for each involved NGI (the NIL?). This
group will *not* do any scientific review of the request; it will only
make the necessary arrangements with the resource owners in order to get
the resources allocated and will define all the operational aspects
(which VO to use, etc.). The assumption here is that all requests will
be accepted provided that there are enough resources available (provided
by the NGIs interested in the activity and community) or will be reduced
in size according to the resource availability.

6)Users are requested to sign a document (a sort of AUP), where they
accept the EGI rules and they commit to take some actions
(acknowledgment to EGI and the NGIs in their publications and in their
web servers, upload of their publications to the defined reference
repository, etc.)

7)After a defined time frame (either the foreseen duration or a fixed
time: six months?) the EGI Allocation Team assesses the accomplishment of the requested actions and then decides if the activities can continue.
At this stage it is also important to assess if this activity has been
able to promote the virtuous cycle to strengthen the national research
groups and to provide assets to NGIs or involved Resource Centers to ask
for additional money from the funding agencies

8)Every time a new request is delivered a dedicated Subgroup is set up,
including the same two people representing EGI.eu and the relevant NGI
representatives.

9)Twice a year the EGI’s User Support coordinator reports about the
resource pool usage and the outcome of these activities.