A key drawcard of the Building KAREN Communities for Collaboration forum is the ex-pat New Zealander and aptly known 'father of the Grid', Ian Foster.

Ian is in Auckland from 2 to 5 July to attend the forum, and is giving the closing address on 4 July. Ian is also available to meet with people on 5 July in Auckland. Contact Vicki Lindsay (vicki.lindsay (at) reannz.co.nz) to arrange a meeting.

Bill St. Arnaud, Senior Director Advanced Networks at CANARIE (Canada's advanced network), recently wrote a great blog highlighting some key concepts presented by Ian around Science 2.0. Here's a snippet:

"A presentation I highly recommend is one given by Ian Foster at a recent D-Grid meeting.

The first generation of grids and eScience involved a strong coupling between the application and the underlying computational infrastructure.  The second generation, built around Web 2.0 and Service Orientated Architecture will empower many more users to deploy service oriented science where people create services independent of any specific computational infrastructure which anyone can discover. Users can now decouple their applications from the computational infrastructure and select best of breed facilities anywhere in the world."

For more information on this item and for a link to Ian's presentation please visit Bill's blog at http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/

Ian's own blog also comes highly recommended by Bill. You can view his blog at http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/

Further information on the forum can be found on our website at http://www.reannz.co.nz/building-karen-communities-for-collaboration/