Sequestration Kills Another Meeting
The Eighth International Conference on Mars Postponed Until 2014
“The impacts of sequestration on the Federal budget have led to new travel policies that severely constrain the participation of NASA center employees, including JPL, and other government employees (e.g., the U.S. Geological Survey) in scientific conferences, including the planned 8th International Mars Conference set for July 15-19 on the Caltech campus. The current fiscal environment is sufficiently restrictive that we, the organizers of the conference, have decided to delay the meeting for one year, holding it instead in June/July of 2014.”
I understand that meetings have many qualitative reasons for existing– informal talking amongst those present being the chief. Still: would not much substantive sharing of ideas and presentation of papers be made with some sort of video link?
Video conferencing (small or large groups) isn’t the same for a variety of reasons:
1) people “multi-task” when watching a video presentation. Yes, every speaker knows about people emailing or working on their laptop in the room, but it’s less of a problem.
2) the informal interaction in the hallways and between sessions is probably the most useful aspect. You can interact with people for short times while standing in line for coffee or lunch or just between sessions, in a way that cannot be duplicated by a phone call or email. For one thing, you might not even know their name until you’ve talked to them. There’s a lot of body language that helps, too. You float a trial balloon and immediately see the response.
3) There needs to be a pathway for unofficial interaction when doing things like developing a consensus or standard. All decent standards had a lot of hallway informal discussion and scribbling on white boards and napkins before they reached the formality of a draft with comments.
4) Conferences are where “negative results” are discussed. You don’t see many papers reporting negative results in the journals or even in the conference proceedings. But most presenters are happy to *talk* about things that didn’t go so well. Sometimes during their presentation (if it’s not a “read the slides”) and usually during the other “social” time.
5) Conferences are a great place to find out about what equipment and/or vendors are effective and which aren’t. Nobody is going to put in writing:”Vendor X gave us a lot of grief and their product Y met the specs but didn’t work very well because of Z” But, if you are talking to them over lunch, and you say, “we were thinking about getting a Y from X”, they might say “You know, if Z is an issue for you, you might think about talking to vendor A instead, because here’s what we ran into”. And then, someone across the table who had a great experience with vendor X, pipes up and says, yeah, but that Y box works fantastic for this other application, but it’s not a good fit for your application.”
Video conferencing (small or large groups) isn’t the same for a variety of reasons
Probably not, but so what?
It’s the new reality. People need to stop whining and learn to make it work.
Get over it.
It’s quite common, in my experience, that people behave very differently when they know it’s all being recorded, in order, start to finish, which has likely become standard procedure for video-conferencing, even if only as a way to take the minutes. A single off-the-record comment that you don’t hear as a result can easily cost you months or millions.
I wouldn’t trust video conferencing to buy a car or listen to a concert, so I certainly don’t want to use it for a business meeting, where the stakes could be a lot higher, if I could avoid it.
I agree value of face to face meetings, many times people will say something in person they will never say on a email or in a teleconference. Another advantage is asking a question which can be interpreted as a idiotic or that-was-on-other-people’s-mind-but-none-asked type of question.
I’ve done a lot of meetings by teleconference, and it’s not a good replacement for face to face meetings.
The only time teleconferences really work is if all of the people involved know each other very, very well i.e. have had lots of previous face-to-face meetings …