New GUID working groups and work plan

[Ricardo Scachetti Pereira]

    Hi all,

    Now that the first GUID workshop is over, we would like to lay down
a work plan to move forward with GUID work and to prepare for our next
meeting later this year.

    As you may have seen in the workshop report, we have created two
main follow-up areas or working groups to carry on the tasks and address
the issues identified by the group. These two groups are the direct
result of the break-out groups formed during the last day of the GUID-1
workshop. The groups are:

    * The Infrastructure Working Group - will address the key issues
regarding the deployment of LSID as the GUID technology for biodiversity
informatics.
    * The Prototyping Working Group - will develop prototypes of test
cases to test aspects of a GUID infrastructure.

    Due to some overlap between the groups and to simplify our work a
little, we have collapsed the 4 original workshop break-out groups into
the main working groups above. The groups convened by Richard Pyle
(Conceptual vs. Digital LSIDs) and me (LSID spec review and software gap
analysis) are now listed as activities under the Infrastructure Working
Group. These changes are organizational only and are not supposed to
change the mission and mandate of those break-out groups in any way.

    I have made changes to the GUID wiki to reflect and support this
structure. There are links to the two working groups from the home page.
Each working group page has links to individual activities/prototype
pages that will be used to record the respective discussions,
developments, conclusions, and recommendations. These pages are only
placeholders for now.

    In the coming days we will be trying to identify coordinators and
participants to get each of those activities/prototypes started.
Volunteers are most welcome.

    I would like to ask you to please look at these new wiki sections
and make yourself familiar with the tasks and page templates. Please
feel free to make comments and suggestions.

    More on this later.

    Best regards,

Ricardo