Rationale
The IST programme performance is subject of continuous monitoring and evaluation. At the initiative of the European commission, a collaborative task has been created to define indicators to measure the impact of the grid initiatives on the strategic objectives of the EC work programme with respect to grid computing. This task force will also specify a way to evaluate these indicators during the course of the projects. The indicators for the grid initiative have to be compatible with the indicators for the individual projects.

Objectives
The objectives of the task on indicators and impact assessments are:
- to complement the mandatory section on indicators and impact assessment in each project’s Description of Work;
- to define an approach and methods for refining the right indicators for the various types of projects and the ways to measure them;
- to achieve compatible indicators amongst projects; - to ensure that the individual project indicators integrate and aggregate to provide a coherent assessment of the whole Strategic Objective (SO);
- to perform the integration of the projects’ individual assessments;
- to identify success stories amongst the results of all Grid projects and ensure their proper presentation.

EC project involved
AKOGRIMO, COREGRID, DATAMININGGRID, GRIDCOORD, HPC4U, INTELIGRID, K-WF Grid, NEXTGRID, ONTOGRID, PROVENANCE, SIMDAT, UNIGRIDS.

Procedures
The assessment shall be performed each year. The information on the indicators shall be provided by the projects as part of their annual reviewing process. A working group open for representatives of each project will aggregate the information and select highlights for external presentations. A core team will prepare the meetings of the working group and ensure that the information on the indicators is consistent amongst the projects.

Status
FhG-SCAI, the institute in charge of the coordination and integration of collaboration task 6 on indicators, along with the task group, elaborated a set of indicators to be completed by all EC projects involved. Derived from the two strategic objectives of the Grid Technology Research Unit, 7 evaluation criteria were deduced (in italic). For each of these criteria, one to two indicators were defined.

• The co-operation among initiatives in the member states and EC initiatives has increased
  Indicator 1: Number of steps taken and actions initiated (ERA Coordination)
• The influence of members of the ERA in the global Grid community has increased
  Indicator 2: The degree of involvement in Grid Standards Community (GGF, OASIS, W3C and EGA)
  Indicator 3: Downloads of European Grid Middleware
• Interaction between academic and industrial partners has increased.
  Indicator 4: Number of commercial representatives participating in European Grid events
  Indicator 5: Number of partnerships for product development between industrial and research partners for grid related services and products resulting from European Projects has been increased
• Degree of Grid penetration in Complex Problem Solving and new application areas
  Indicator 6: The percentage and absolute number of applications using grid technology
  Indicator 7: Number of grid-enabled and cluster computing resources, which are made available by vendors and academia to external organisations (or other departments in the same organisation) for industrial and academic production codes
• Grid enabled collaboration within business communities (such as distributed supply chains) has increased
  Indicator 8: The number of grid enabled analysis methods, problem solving environments and workflow tools in selected application areas (such as engineering and pharma), which are relevant for industrial usage
• The capability and functionality of next-generation grid toolkits and middleware has been increased
  Indicator 9: The number of new products resulting from the GRID IST projects
• New generic grid toolkits and middleware make the application of Grid technology possible and easier.
  Indicator 10: Evaluation reports by external users of the new products, tools and environments

Participating EC projects were then requested to collect informations for indicators 2, 5 , 6, 7 and 8. A draft of the results received so far has been deliver to the European Commission.