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VO 2.0?

We just held an interesting and I think successful workshop on Virtual Organisations and Grids, in which we looked at the limitations of the current state of the art and what is needed to support industrial requirements. A short summary is in the works and will appear on the Grid Computing Now! web site in a couple of days, with a longer report to follow in due course.

What I want to raise here is a more speculative notion that arose during the discussions - what would be the Web 2.0 implementation of a Virtual Organisation (VO)? Could users easily create their own VO, invite their colleagues to join, actually manage distributed access in a distributed fashion, etc.? Obviously, being Web 2.0, the legal and contractual issues would have to be minimal, so this would apply more to open-source projects.

The nearest model I can think of is more the SourceForge approach, in which anyone can create a project and invite others to join. The SourceForge (or equivalent) software provides core functionality to support the process. I haven't particularly thought of SourceForge in the Web 2.0 model before and it does seem to fit the idea of people forming networks - the people are developers rather than "end users" and the network has a particular purpose, but the basic approach is the same. I wonder whether it would work for VOs?

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