ERCIM's Board of Directors unanimously accepted INRIA's offer to host the ERCIM Office and reappointed Jérôme Chailloux as Manager for the next three years from June 2008 to May 2011. INRIA has been hosting the ERCIM Office since the beginning, providing the ERCIM Manager and supporting the costs for running the office. Michel Cosnard, CEO and Chairman of INRIA, stated: "As a co-founder of ERCIM nineteen years ago, INRIA is proud that ERCIM is now a key actor of the European research area in Information and Communication Science and Technologies."

Anne-Marie Kermarrec and Bruno Lévy from INRIA received each the "Starting Independent Research Grant" of the European Research Council (ERC).

Steven J. Murdoch from University of Cambridge received the best thesis award of the ERCIM Working Group on Security and Trust Management for his excellent Ph.D. thesis "Covert channel vulnerabilities in anonymity systems". Steven's thesis represents an outstanding contribution on the study of privacy and anonymity aspects in real systems and meets all the desired requirements. The evaluation committee particularly favoured its exceptional practical impact.

Roberto Scopigno is the recipient of the Eurographics "Outstanding Technical Contributions" Award 2008 in recognition of his outstanding contributions to multiresolution modeling and rendering, 3D scanning, surface reconstruction, scientific visualization, volume rendering and applications to cultural heritage.

Over 500 members of the global grid community gathered at the 23rd Open Grid Forum (OGF23) in Barcelone to network, showcase achievements, map out requirements for distributed computing and push forward standardization. The event helped connect the people of OGF and newcomers from across the globe. OGF and the recently EU-funded OGF-EUROPE project strongly support engagement on a truly global level to ensure that people work together to drive openness and interoperability that is of value to business and science. In this respect, OGF welcomed the participation of three EU projects that are highly active in the development and deployment of distributed computing between Europe, China and India: Bridge, EchoGRID and EU-IndiaGrid. The three projects are a good example of global partnerships bringing not just technical value-add but also playing a central role in strengthening relations between Europe and other parts of the world.

W3C published a report on the June 2008 Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. Participants discussed how numerous available services on mobile phones could help people in underserved regions. Discussion underlined the need for a concerted effort among all the stakeholders (including practitioners, academics, regulators, and mobile industry) to build a shared view of the future of the mobile platform as a tool to bridge the digital divide. The Workshop was jointly organized by W3C and NIC.br, as part of the Digital World Forum (DWF) project led by W3C and managed by ERCIM. DWF is supported by the European Union's 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7).