Looking For User Advisory Committee: The Next Generation
Keith’s note: This is the question I asked at the User Advisory Council meeting today. “I have a question about the actual composition of the User’s Advisory Group: With one exception only one person seems to be under 50 years of age and the panel is rather heavily loaded with Big Aerospace management. There is no apparent representation of the next generation of people who will actually live and work in space – you know, young people. Is this lack of representation by the next generation deliberate or an oversight?”
Nice. This never seems to change. I remember in the early 90s similar situations and it never really seems to have changed much.
I couldn’t hear the replies but it sure sounds like they brushed aside your question.
Given the nature of the Beltway I suspect the UAG was created the way most of these advisory groups are assembled, by simply assembling the usual folks with connections in the Beltway or are known to the folks in the Beltway who put it together.
Maybe the answer is to just have someone assemble a list of folks under 30 who could be added to the UAG and submit it to Scott Pace. A list of individuals who have experience and/or knowledge that could contribute to it.
They did solicit nominations, so this advisory group wasn’t just a list of insiders put together by another insider. However, how the members were selected from the nominees was not a transparent process. Actually, it seemed completely opaque to me. That’s typical. And there does seem to be a tendency for the people in charge to pick people they know. There is some point to that: If you don’t want the meetings to degenerate into endless arguments over pointless details, you do want to pick people you know aren’t prone to that sort of thing. When someone looks at a person’s accomplishments and qualifications, there’s a natural tendency to give more weight to things you’re more familiar with. And there is always an unconscious bias to favor people who are like yourself. But even when there any conscious intent to rig the membership, this sort of process almost inevitably results in biased selections. Avoiding that requires deliberate effort by people who actually admit they have unconscious biases.
I agree, there was no master list of nominations or how they were selected. But from what I heard from the meeting yesterday they seem to be flexible and interested in listening. Its one thing to say they should have some younger members and another to actually suggest 3 or 4 that would work. I suspect they would be far more open to the latter option whereas the first just seemed to take them off guard as they likely didn’t even think to include that in the process for selection.
I do hope you didn’t expect a clear, concise, truthful answer.
It would be nice to know the selection process.
Hopefully we won’t be fobbed off with “what could anyone U30 add to the group ? How could they be knowledgeable enough to contribute ?”