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Andrew Martin (Oxford) via email

• when cross-institution projects get funded, legal ownership of the resources is allocated to those individaul institutions. But they are expected to share those resources across the project as a whole. So some people see that as a VO. Almost by definition, a VO can't own any resources, but in this context it comes close.
• likewise with projects that get given a particular kind of access to a third party resource: HPC(x), for example. The resource belongs to someone else. The time on it belongs to a particular real organisation. But the ability to access it might be shared by the VO.
• some people use the term to refer to a well-defined collaboration, with legal agreements in place among the parties. That's not really a VO, is it; it's more of an RO (real organisation). But is there a spectrum? A pure RO is established at law, can own property, be sued, etc. A pure VO is just an attribute service, perhaps. Or perhaps being a VO implies having some kind of agreement, too. But I don't like that so much --- it seems to compromise the purity of the idea, and make it heavier. But you can't issue attributes without some kind of policy for who gets them. So a VO must have a policy. Or must it?
• do the members of, say, the Grid and Shib mailing list constitute a VO? And if so, why? or why not? They don't typically have any funding in common; they have implicity agreed to share some ideas, however.