Another Meeting Cancelled Due to Sequestration
Keith’s note: NASA has cancelled the Second Kepler Science Conference, which was to be held at NASA Ames on November 4-8, 2013. This cancellation is now posted on the Kepler Mission web site I am told that the organizers hope to postpone this meeting and hold it again at NASA Ames, perhaps one year later, i.e., November 2014, assuming that the sequestration restrictions on NASA will have been lifted by then.
These meeting cancellations may seem like small potatoes to some people, but they are the first real, rather than possible, losses from the sequestration situation. The public loses out on learning anything more than what’ posted on the program web site (the funds for which have also been cut).
I have to wonder how this affects communications between the various groups working the program, and if it actually ends up costing the program more money (for unbudgeted communications, documentation, and associated man-hours) instead of saving money.
Given that there’s still no game plan, I think we can expect more of this kind of loss at an accelerating pace. And, of course, Congress — the only involved party that seems to be ignoring the looming sequestration time bomb — will publicly blame others for it.
Why can’t the face to face meetings be replaced with virtual meetings? One can provision all the multimedia across the net. A virtue would be that the full proceedings could then be made available to the public.
-Chris
You can, to some extent, if you have the infrastructure to support it, but I think the application is not universally appropriate. Many employees participate daily in teleconferences and use web-based presentation software to reduce the number of face-to-face meetings they have. It works reasonably well as long as you don’t need to lay your hands on some piece of hardware you might need to test or look at a facility that’s going to run your next experiment.
Technical conferences, however, are a different animal. You are more focused on the presentations and are generally less distracted by the day-to-day of your job. For me, this generally leads to increased creativity and the development of new ideas. Although the presentations are important, much of the value in attending comes from the side meetings and discussions in the halls. Those interactions are tough to do virtually.
It seems wildly optimistic to think that funds will be available for 2014. The GOP has made it abundantly clear that they intend to destroy all functions of the federal government short of national defense. The best that can be reasonably hoped is a more rational Congress in 2015. Though, with brazenly gerrymandered Congressional districts in so many states, a majority of the vote is no longer a guarantor of a majority of the seats.
Uh, I thought sequestration was for FY13 federal budget. FY14 begins on Oct 1, 2013. Sounds like another excuse by an Obama appointed administration hack who can’t manage budgets. No surprise in light of the JWST debacle.
Also the NASA Digital TV Group meeting in early April as well as The Network Support Group (NSG) which was to meet this week at JSC.