More about the Climate Change Integration Plugfest to be launched at FOSS4G

As a further explanation to the press release below about the OGC's Climate Change Integration Plugfest, to be launched at the FOSS4G conference.
The theme for FOSS4G is "User Driven" which means we want to highlight how Open Source solves Geospatial Business Problems; in particular, integrating with existing Geospatial infrastructure.
The Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP) will show Open Source & Proprietary applications playing nicely, primarily through OGC standards. This will attract Spatial Data Infrastructure sponsors to the conference, who will in turn start deploying Open Standards, and open opportunities for Open Source.
The conference will open with a keynote presentation from the OGC (probably Raj Singh) walking through the CCIP scenario, highlighting participating applications and framing the theme for the rest of the conference, and close with a panel discussion from CCIP implementers.
We will be encouraging (but not mandating) presentations, workshops and tutorials to make use of the Web Services provided by the CCIP. Hosting services locally will reduce the network latency regularly experienced at conferences by people trying to access services back home.
One of the attractions for the CCIP is that we are planning for it to live on beyond FOSS4G, and be toured around at future conferences. If you are involved in other Geospatial conferences, please get involved and make sure we have a suitable succession plan in place which suites you.
A Climate Change scenario has been chosen because:

• It is topical
• It is relevant to many of us in the Geospatial Industry
• It will give us the opportunity to apply our skills to save the world (if only in a small way)

The scope of the CCIP could be huge and we need to ensure we keep the scope simple, easily achievable, and highly successful. We still have a lot of work ahead, defining what the CCIP will look like and then shaping it. I hope you will join us. Start by joining the email list linked from:
http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/ClimateChallenge2009/WebHome