You may remember me from sundry past activities -- the last time
was when you were kind enough to talk at our Java Grande meeting in 1999.
Today I would like to ask you to give the keynote talk at the Grid Forum
meeting held this July 16 and 17 in Washington DC. You could choose
your day. I believe the audience would interested in most anything
you would say -- peer to peer systems and JXTA would be a great choice.
I append some background on the community Grid activities below.

Personally I am very excited by JXTA as you have identified some key ideas and
architectural principles. I spend some time building synchrononous
collaboration systems (trying to improve on commercial systems like WebEx and
Centra) for distance education. Our new system uses queues managed by JMS and I
am looking at how we can reformulate this publish/subscribe system using your
pipe primitive.
Also such applications suggest ways of labelling messages with some
sort of generalized "topics" which could suggest more controlled
message delivery. My idea is a "Peer to Peer Grid" combining both
the server-based JMS (Grid) model with the more dynamic informal P2P model.


--- Grid Forum Background -- http://www.gridforum.org ---------
The next Global Grid Forum meeting is in the DC area (actually Tyson's 
Corner) 15-18 July, with the keynote slot being Monday morning the 
16th.  We are estimating 400-500 people.
Here is the history, including keynotes when we have 
had them-

GF1 (San Jose, no keynote) 150 people, 2-3 countries, 60 orgs
GF2 (Chicago, no keynote) 125 people, 3-4 countries, 60 orgs
GF3 (San Diego, Larry Smarr) 160 people, 5-6 countries, 70 orgs
GF4 (Redmond, no keynote) 120 people, 5-6 countries, 70 orgs
GF5 (Boston, Bob Sproull/Sun) 190 people, 8 countries, 100 orgs
GGF1 (Amsterdam, Brian Carpenter/IBM) 376 people, 29 countries, 200 orgs

(We changed the numbering scheme and prepended "Global" to our name because 
we merged with the Europeans in late 2000 and did not want them to feel 
swallowed.)

There are 13 working groups now and we have produced about 100 white papers 
(including some joint with IETF such as GridFTP).  We are about to launch a 
document series, but intend to send Internet-style standards to IETF - not 
wanting to compete with IETF, W3C, etc.

Technically, there are some good things happening within Global GF in terms 
of reducing duplication of effort and raising awareness of what others are 
doing.  For instance a new group is focused on portals and so the dozens of 
portal projects are now talking about common ways to describe things with 
XML, etc.
There are efforts looking at Jini and we expect to expand to looking at JXTA.