GÉANT has many communities of practice around its tools and services. Some of these have evolved into very formalised mechanisms - such as the support, governance and policy around eduroam and eduGAIN - and some of these are more informal - for example the BoFs held at TNC, developer mailing lists etc. Many of these informal communities would like to consider a more formal approach around best practice, governance and communications in order to better support the overall sustainability of the tool or service in question. This formalisation could take many forms and differ for many groups, and some groups may have some of these features in place already, however areas for improvement could include:
A GÉANT Community Activity that supports and provides templates and instructions for creating such a formalised community of practice could help these communities set up their own infrastructure and support more effectively than each area trying to support these mechanisms on their own. It would also help support the proposed Open Source Principles for NRENs and the proposed approaches to open source for NRENs that are laid out in the principles.