Organisation and Structure
of the ICEAGE forum
What is the Forum?
The ICEAGE forum will be a crucial opinion forming, creative community, supported by WP1. It is intended that it will be a high-profile and well respected group that has considerable international influence. The Forum will include a group of stakeholders in the field of Grid Education who will aim to use their expertise to enhance international influence so as to impact on policy-making. To achieve this, the following conditions must be met:
- Attract and retain intellectual investment from a strong membership.
- Stimulate and lead that group to work on strategic issues in grid education.
- Ensure that their judgements and insights are well recorded, promulgated and published.
- Establish a critical mass of members, material and activities at an early stage.
What ICEAGE brings to the Forum
The ICEAGE project will ensure that the following incentives sustain commitment to the Forum:
- A high status reputation and the kudos of being a member, through careful selection of members, and through well polished, useful, succinct and strategically relevant reports.
- A commitment that by being active in the ICEAGE Forum a member will have significant influence on advanced grid education in areas that are important to that member.
- A high-value because the international and multi-disciplinary membership with a focus on education will be a unique opportunity to develop strategic insights that bear on all aspects of the educational response to the advent of pervasive e-Infrastructures.
- A guarantee of effective mutual support, through two meetings per year and through a number of effective communication channels, such as working groups and e-Discussions.
- Efficient use of members' time and efforts through: carefully planning meetings, preparing discussions well, highly effective follow up, and the provision of support for publicity, report preparation and other communications.
Members of the Forum
The majority of members will already be committed to advanced grid education. They will therefore find their personal investment pays off, because they can steer ICEAGE activities to help them meet their own goals, for example:
- Influence the curricula, topics and approaches for which training material is prepared.
- Obtain expert speakers and tutorials at their institutions, events and workshops.
- Arrange workshops and summer schools in their region.
- Develop local networks of advanced grid education enthusiasts.
- Attract the best students to their courses and summer schools.
How does the Forum meet?
As part of the effort to use members' time and effort efficiently meetings will be arranged juxtaposed to summer schools, major conferences and EU gatherings. There will be three meetings in Europe, each in a different region and one in North America or Asia. Specialist subgroups will meet if they need to at locations that suit the specialists; e.g., if a group of geoscientists are planning the steps to persuade Geoscience educators to adapt their curricula, the meetings would be co-located with Geoscience conferences.
