The potential of truly large scale grids can only be realized with grid architectures and deployment strategies that lower the need for human administrative intervention, and therefore open the grid to wider participation from resources and users. Self-organizing grids (SOGs) are characterized by services, protocols, and deployment strategies that promote true scalability by eliminating administrative bottlenecks. We describe four enabling mechanisms for SOGs - automatically inferring grid structure, tracking and making available dynamic resource state information, unifying the grid service deployment model, and making effective use of intermittently connected grid hosts via lightweight fault tolerance mechanisms that take advantage of the resource fault characteristics