Notes from the last USAG meeting April 21st 2010

Attendance

GGUS - Guenter Grein, Torsten Antoni
CERN - Maria Dimou (chairperson and note taker), Harry Renshall
IT   - Riccardo Brunetti, Tiziana Ferrari
CE    - Jan Kmunicek
ROC_LA - Renato Santana
APROC - ShuTing Liao

Apologies: Claire Deveneux, John Kewley

Summary and conclusions

1. Agenda: Approved.
2. Post USAG what? USAG being an EGEE III body, the main discussion item at the meeting was its 're-incarntion' bodies in EGI and WLCG.
   Maria, just before the meeting, received information on the EGI InSPIRE User Community Board (UCB), (description linked here and on the USAG agenda) which will be based in Amsterdam. Participants were not aware of it.
   Tiziana said that the Mandate of the EGEE USAG (linked from here for reminder will be changed and distributed to various stake holders.
   Torsten received information from Steven Newhouse during the meeting on UCB being a new name for the 'political' body 'User Forum Steering Committee'. USAG will still exist as an acronym but it will stand for User Services Advisory Group, it will have a broader scope covering, not only GGUS, but all service issues important to the community.
   Harry said that if conflicts of interest ever arise in terms of User Support development choices and prioritisation, they should be resolved by the EGI.eu member in UCB.
   Tiziana, Jan and Torsten will send to usag@cern.ch all additional information they can find. ACTION!!!
   Maria, asked by Torsten about WLCG plans, confirmed that WLCG Service and Operational aspects continue. Communication with the sites and other Grid Support Units will continue via its tool of choice (GGUS). Dissemination and prioritisation will be done via existing channels, i.e. the WLCG Daily Operations, MB and Tier1 coordination meetings. Development coordination will continue via the GGUS Shopping List meetings, with focus on savannah items of general use and WLCG requests.
3. Should GGUS tickets be automatically closed under certain conditions? The question was inspired by CERN PRMS practices, one of the local ticketing systems GGUS interfaces with. Some participants agree that cases 'Waiting for reply' left without reply for several weeks would justify ticket closure. Nevertheless, automatism is risky in this case as traffic about the ticket can take place in email threads or with different email addresses to the one used when submitting or other channels. Therefore it was decided to leave it up to the discretion of the supporters to close idle tickets manually when appropriate and include a written justification.
4. A development proposal to avoid GGUS tickets bouncing back to the submitter site admins Guenter's proposal to make a new section on the GGUS ticket submit form labelled 'Routing information' where the 'Site to notify' and the 'Site submitting' will be clearly stated was adopted as a great functionality improvement.
5. What will happen to the gocwiki after EGEE III? ShuTing kindly joined the meeting, despite the late time in Taiwan. She confirmed that the gocwiki will remain available as the document repository for the Grid community. Tiziana said that INFN, KIT and ASGC will sit together to update/clean-up out-of-date documents under the TPM document section in the gocwiki which is now one of the TPM functions. ACTION!!!
6. A.O.B.Participants thanked Maria for her work as the USAG chairperson. She thanked everyone in return for the constructive ideas born in these meetings.