 Three meetings are organized per year, divided (approximately evenly after averaging over a number of years) between North America, Europe and East Asia.Many working groups organize face-to-face meetings in the interim.The concept of a "forum" to bring together developers, practitioners, and users of distributed computing (known as "grid computing" at the time) was discussed at a "Birds of a Feather" session in November 1998 at the SC98 supercomputing conference.