Yet Another Stealth TEDxNASA Event

Keith’s note:There is another TEDxNASA event today – hosted by NASA Langley. This event was only publicly announced three days in advance, well after the “invitation only” attendees were selected. Taxpayers across the region were not given a chance to attend. There is no mention of this event at NASA’s Office of Education webpage, at NASA.gov or the NASA.gov event calendar, the NASA.gov students page,or in the most recent issue of NASA Education Express. One would think that an expensive education-oriented event such as this would be worthy of coordination with NASA’s Education Office. In the press release issued only 3 days before the event no mention is made of how media can attend, no provisions for the hearing impaired (interperter, captioning, etc) are mentioned, and it is being held at a time when most people are taking time off i.e. on a weekend. And since it is being held on a weekend, why couldn’t this have been aired live on NASA TV? All that is on the schedule is re-airing of things that happened last week.
Despite having hosted several TEDxNASA events in the past, no emails were sent to previous TEDxNASA participants. The agenda is not easy to find either – NASA does not list it. I stumbled across it here on another organization’s website. What has ANY of this to do with space exploration? If this is only about STEM education sans any space component, then why is NASA doing this to begin with – and not the Department of Education? Are there any attendees from Northern Virginia? Any home schooled students? Any disabled students?
To be certain, it is nice that Lesa Roe and Steve Craft are interested in education, etc. But they repeatedly avoid the common sense, PR 101 aspects of these TEDxNASA events and therefore pass on a chance to leverage these things to the advantage of the entire agency and people who do not live in Hampton, Virginia.