NGI International Liaison

Every NGI and EIRO of EGI delegates an International Liaison to EGI. These NGI International Laisions (NILs) have a key networking role in the EGI community. NILs work together with teams in EGI.eu and in other NGIs to link non-operational activities from their own NGI with the rest of the EGI community. One of the most important of these non-operational activities is Engagement with new communities. With the NIL acting as a spearhead, each country (or EIRO) is able to connect its non-operational activities to the European landscape to facilitate services for new communities together, and to demonstrate the added value of the country to new communities and to other NGIs.

EGI forms and implements its Engagement Strategy within the NGIs through the NILs, because NILs connect the following activities from the national level to the European level:

• Outreach
• Marketing and communication
• Training
• Proactive outreach and support for new communities

The NIL role and about their coordination within EGI

• The NILs are subscribed to the <ngi-international-liaisons@mailman.egi.eu> email list which is used for coordination and discussion of activities. List archive is available at https://mailman.egi.eu/mailman/private/ngi-international-liaisons/.
• The NILs are involved in the development and implementation of EGI's Engagement Strategy (http://go.egi.eu/engagementstrategy), ie. reaching out to new communities, collecting and analysing their requirements, setting up support for them.
  • Abstract of the EGI Engagement Strategy document: EGI Engagement reaches out to scientific communities, to national initiatives, to the long tail of science as well as to SMEs and industry and supports them in tackling scientific challenges using reliable and innovative ICT services and solutions. The Engagement Strategy coordinates EGI members’ activities to accomplish this complex mission, ultimately contributing to the European effort of building a sustainable digital e-infrastructure ecosystem for research. The Engagement Strategy document describes the specific goals of the EGI engagement activity, details the various tasks that this activity involves, provides information about the human networks and online resources and tools that help the community implement this strategy, as well as provides an action plan for the upcoming months.

• Regular teleconferences are organised for the NILs (typically once a month). These are titled 'Engagement meetings'. Future and past events are available at https://indico.egi.eu/indico/categoryDisplay.py?categId=36.
• Face-to-face meetings are organised twice per year for the NILs. These meetings are co-located with the main EGI Forums/Conferences (one in the spring and one in the autumn).
• NILs are participating in the creation and implementation of short, focussed projects, called Virtual Teams (Further information: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/EGI_Virtual_teams).
• The NIL activity is coordinated by the Technical Outreach Manager of EGI.eu, Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu).

Resources for the NILs - To be successful in reaching out and supporting new communities

• EGI Engagement Strategy: http://go.egi.eu/engagementstrategy
• Repository of communication and marketing materials and templates: http://www.egi.eu/news-and-media/publications/
• Registry of upcoming events that can be relevant for EGI members to attend and promote EGI (with planned contributions from EGI): https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Community_events
• To see an up-to-date picture of the support cases that are currently in the Engagement workflow, please go to http://go.egi.eu/technicalsupportcases. (An RT queue with public access)
• How to capture details of a new engagement case that should be followed up in EGI:
  • Capture the case in the technical-support-cases RT queue, as described in this document: https://documents.egi.eu/document/2478 OR
  • Report back during the regular (monthly) Engagement board teleconferences OR Send details in email to support@egi.eu
• Email lists:
  • NILs: ngi-international-liaisons@mailman.egi.eu
  • UCB: UCB-discuss@mailman.egi.eu
  • Leaders of EGI-Engage Competence Centres: egi-engage-wp6@mailman.egi.eu
• NIL table: http://www.egi.eu/community/ngis/NILs.html
• Requirements Tracking: The evolution of the European Grid Infrastructure is driven by the users. Therefore capturing and following up feedback from users reached during Engagement is a key goal for all the three phases of the Engagement activity.
  • Capture the support cases in tickets: http://go.egi.eu/technicalsupportcases. If no ticket exists for the case (i.e. community/project), then register it. For further information please refer to https://documents.egi.eu/document/2478.
  • To gather requirements from EGI user communities in a systematic way, a standard template has been designed. The template and captured requirements are available at https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Communties_Requirements.
• Templates for Virtual Team projects:
  • Description of Virtual Teams: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Virtual_teams
  • Project initiation document template, and project final report template: https://documents.egi.eu/document/1991
  • VT project wiki page template: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/VT_Template_Wiki_page