Another Stealthy Space Studies Board Meeting
Keith’s note: The NAS Space Studies Board is meeting today. Here is the webex Link that the NAS doesn’t want you to know about. Their PR office told me several weeks ago that they would be letting media know about webcasting in advance of their meetings. They never sent me anything despite their pledge to do so. You have to know which internal NASA webpage to go to in order to download an agenda that has the links on them. Alas when you dial in the audio is so faint that you can’t really hear what people are saying. Here are the presentations (not that there is anything interesting)
– Space Studies Board is (Not Really) Interested In What You Think, earlier post
For anyone interested in watching these meetings live and/or viewing the slides, Nasawatch is not the place to find schedules. For those on Pacific time, this information from Nasawatch was too late. Where is the link to the page with the schedule of events?
I scanned through the PDF files and most of the documents are maybe 4 slides which makes me wonder if they are releasing a bare minimum of slides for public consumption. One had to view the Webex. The only one with substantial information (let’s call it Open Source material) was from ESA (Jean Pierre Swings, Jean Claude Worms). The ESA has 20 members countries. My impression is that the ESA with its diverse membership, is a more open organization than the US space agency NASA. Despite existing in the freest country in the World, the one that defended the World from communist takeover, we fail to provide openness of government of the people, by the people, for the people (we know how that phrase ends).
If any of this seems corny then we are failing. If it seems naive, then it is the face of arrogance that is reading it and we should hope they are not embedded in our government. So where are the schedules of these meetings listed in the public domain of the internet? Also, the video recording of these meetings should be placed onto the internet. Any one of us could record the meetings from Webex and do so. There should be an official release.
The other side of the coin is that the ESA claims copyright on everything on its web sites, and you can copy/download stuff for “personal use” only, but that’s it. And you can’t modify anything, create something new from it, or use it commercially (like publishing a book, even a book about ESA). From NASA web sites you can use anything not designated as belonging to another party, as long as you credit NASA (which acknowledges NASA’s copyright), even for commercial use. So it seems that at both agencies the rules are not consistent across the board.
Maybe you need to find another website to read.