The EU CHAIN project (Coordination and Harmonization of Advanced e-INfrastructures) aims to elaborate a strategy and define the instruments to ensure coordination and interoperation of the European Grid Infrastructures with other external e-Infrastructures. In its first stage, the project aims to develop a coherent operational and organisational model. To guarantee an up to date and relevant information, a questionnaire has been prepared and distributed in April 2011 in all the regions relevant for the CHAIN project. Two versions of the questionnaire has been released, one targeting a regional and the second the national (and smaller) levels. The questionnaire answers were collected in June 2011 and are currently being analysed to contribute to several important deliverables: D2.2 "Interoperability and interoperation guidelines", due in September 2011, and D4.1 "Specificities of the various regional e- Infrastructures", due in July 2011. While some principles of building e-Infrastructures should be common to all world regions, differences arising from different expectations, previous experience, current scientific potential, and governance models will be identified and described in the Deliverable D4.1. This analysis will allow to propose a first operations and organisational model that will be used to prepare the guidelines for interoperability and interoperation (the D2.2 Deliverable). In the conference presentation and paper we will summarize the findings. A first version of a coherent organizational and operational model for interoperable e-Infrastructure will be also presented, to demonstrate project progress after the first year of work.