The OGF models its process on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and produces documents with many acronyms such as OGSA, OGSI, and JSDL.

[1] Based on response to the idea during this BOF, Ian Foster and Bill Johnston convened the first Grid Forum meeting at NASA Ames Research Center in June 1999, drawing roughly 100 people, mostly from the US.

During 1998, groups similar to Grid Forum began to organize in Europe (called eGrid) and Japan.

Discussions among leaders of these groups resulted in combining to form the Global Grid Forum which met for the first time in Amsterdam in March 2001.

The first version of the DRMAA API was implemented in Sun's Grid engine and also in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's program Condor cycle scavenger.