Sage in Australia, and internationally

["Greg Rose" <nareen.acci.com.au">ggr]

Hi there.

By way of introduction, a bunch of people in Australia have been
working in recent months toward setting up an Australian SAGE. We've
been communication mostly with Elizabeth Zwicky. This week, at a major
workshop in Brisbane, we expect to see the formalisation of this group.
In the following discussion, where I say things like "it will be", you
should understand that to mean "so long as the members agree, and where
relevent, SAGE agrees, everyone else agrees, and no-one comes up with a
better suggestion then volunteers, ... it will be ...".

Initially Australian SAGE will be created as an independent body so
that there can be an elected representative group who can then go off
and negotiate with the other interested parties.

The people who have put the most effort into establishing this are Hal
Miller <halmel.dit.csiro.au>, Frank Crawford
<frankphoton.ansto.gov.au>, Glenn Huxtable <glenncs.uwa.edu.au>, and
myself, Greg Rose <ggracci.com.au>. Three of the four of us are also
committee members of AUUG, which is affiliated with USENIX. One of the
first questions which will have to be resolved is at what level
Australian SAGE will cooperate with AUUG.

Another of the questions which will then need to be addressed soon afterwards
is what level of formality we should adopt in our relationships with
SAGE. I phrased that fairly carefully -- there is no question in our
minds that the *level* of *cooperation* should be high in both directions.
However SAGE is a part of USENIX and that may or may not complicate
*how* we cooperate.

This leads me to the questions. We would like to see discussions
leading towards the establishment of an "umbrella" organisation to tie
all (both) of the SAGEs together. Depending on arrangements, this
might be US-SAGE or it might be a separate tiny body. Either way we
need a forum for discussions, since the distance makes it impossible
for any real quantity of discussions to happen face-to-face. I'll be
at San Diego USENIX though, and happy to meet with people. 

Now the easier question. Could we establish a sage-international
working group and mailing list please? This has already been discussed,
ages ago, and in fact led to Hal and I getting together (even though we
work in the same building, I had no idea he was interested in SAGE...)
I will happily moderate the working group, or I believe Hal is also
willing, or we might agree on another person.

Greg Rose
ggracci.com.au