NASA Does Not Care If You Cannot See Their Public Meetings
NASA Advisory Council Meeting
“Virtual meeting via dial-in teleconference and WebEx only. … Note: Please be advised that the NASA large event WebEx account is being used to support this meeting; this WebEx account is incompatible with the newest Mac operating system introduced in October 2019–MacOS Catalina.”
Keith’s note: Anyone who has attempted to connect to NASA FACA meetings such as the NASA Advisory Council by Webex over the past several weeks has discovered that NASA’s Webex thing is usually screwed up – especially on Mac OS computers. So what does NASA do about that? They just go ahead and continue to use Webex even though there are many alternatives with a simple ‘that’s too bad – sorry’ note in the Federal Register. If everyone was sitting inside a secure NASA facility using Webex that would be one thing. But virtually all participants are going to be sitting at home.
Why is it that millions of regular people who have never teleconferenced at home are attending virtual weddings and graduations – and in my case doing TV interviews – but NASA can’t figure out how to do a simple telecon? One solution would be to broadcast the event on NASA TV. NASA has done split screen stuff before. But even that is apparently too hard for them to pull off. The National Space Council event hosted at NASA HQ earlier this week was an embarassment – even though Jim Bridenstine was onsite at JSC and the DEMO-2 crew were onsite at KSC you could not understand what they said. Even VP Pence noticed saying that he “missed every fifth word”.
This virtual reality is not going away any time soon NASA. it is past time for you to bite the bullet and adapt to it.
Because the people in charge of such ‘infrastructure’ stuff do not care. Not really. If they did, it would be fixed forthwith.
A question, Bob, and not intending to be impertinent: how can that be known? I mean maybe you have direct knowledge. I don’t, which is why the question.
And this: I have regular contact with governmental employees, consistent contact through many decades. And I find that pretty much like anyone else they want to be proud of their work.
Just my experience.
The proof is in the years of pudding. When things are deemed important they are fixed and/or executed with impressive rapidity and competence. Those not deemed important are left alone to wallow. It’s not like the technology & process isn’t available.
How many years has Keith reported on this sort of thing, across a large swath of the agency?
It is certainly possible that the tech folks themselves have the competence to fix things (I suspect they do), but somebody somewhere isn’t turning them on with adequate resources to do so. If said somebody with needed authority cared…why would it remain such an ongoing clusterfrack?
It could be more specific (or myopic) than that. I’ve noticed that many institutions or groups mostly use one operating system. For me, my current lab is almost entirely a Mac shop. There are a few Windows machines around and some unix ones, but probably more than 80% Mac. The last place I worked was almost all Windows. And it can be a long time before you major operating system upgrades.
There are also quite a few people at NASA and at aerospace companies who just don’t think much of teleconferencing. They like in person meetings and may assume all the important people would attend in person. And some managers flatly don’t like the idea their employees working from home. (One once told be he “didn’t understand” the whole concept.) These days, that’s not a tenable position, but I suspect the attitude lingers.
I could easily see someone deciding fixing WebEx to work with macOS Catalina isn’t a priority. Just because virtually everyone they know and work with doesn’t use it, and they haven’t heard anyone complain. And, anyway, none of the important people would be trying to teleconference in rather than going in person. That isn’t being intentionally apathetic; it’s more only noticing or prioritizing the problems one is personally exposed to.
That would be bad management. But it’s more of the clueless, “This can’t be a big deal; I’ve never had any problems and neither have the people I know” attitude.
Precisely. They don’t care about it enough to even give thought to it being an issue.
OK. I take your point, which is better informed than mine.
Ever hear someone say something like “Florida drivers are the worst!” Or similar? It’s just this kind of claim doesn’t seem very useful, that’s all.
On the other hand, and as a longtime Florida resident: “Those New York drivers never learned to use their damn turn signals!”
In all of human history and behavior, where there is smoke there is fire. In this instance the lack of transparency is just an attempt to cover up the smoke. Actions speak louder than words. And these days no one wants to be held accountable so they must hide everything as much as possible. This is not rocket science; but risk analysis and root cause analysis could be performed.