The e-IRG is formed by official governmental delegates of all EU countries and a number of associated and candidate states. It was established to seek consensus on policy-level issues and recommend the best practices for the pan-European grid and research network efforts.

The main objective of the e-IRG is to support - on the political, advisory and monitoring levels - the creation of a policy and administrative framework for the easy and cost-effective shared use of electronic resources in Europe (focusing on Grid-computing, data storage, and networking resources) across technological, administrative and national domains. The decisions and policies emerging from this process have a profound impact for the structure, competitiveness and innovation potential of the European Research Area.

The e-IRGSP2, funded by the European Commission’s 7^th Framework programme, is the second support programme for the e-IRG. The total budget for the 36 months duration of the project is € 1.6 million. The objective of the project is to provide means to facilitate the information flow between the e-IRG members, and to raise broader public attention to the activities of the e-IRG, in particular among key groups from the innovation potential point of view, such as different types of end-users and developers of the e-infrastructure technologies.

The e-IRGSP2 involves eight European project partners and is coordinated by CSC, the Finnish IT center for Science. CSC also takes care of project's dissemination activities. Other partners are:

• Netherlands Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF), Netherlands
• Emergence-Tech Limited (ETL), UK
• Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas (LIP), Portugal
• Greek Research and Academic Network (GRNET), Greece
• Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), Greece
  Genias Benelux (Genias), Netherlands
• Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), Poland.

See also the E-IRG Knowledge Base, which is designed to support the work of the e-IRG and to provide insight in what e-Infrastructures are available both in European countries and at a European level.