Funding for NASA Conference Travel is Cut: Now What?
The new NASA Authorization Act, currently awaiting Bush’s signature, cuts NASA’s total authorized spending on conferences by two-thirds, to $5 million in FY 09. NASA, and the aerospace industry in general, love conferences, so this is causing a good deal of consternation. While certainly some face to face interaction at conferences is valid and important for knowledge sharing and professional relationship building, I’m personally of the opinion that much of NASA’s investment in conferences– especially pricey invite-only events like the Future Forums that celebrated NASA’s 50th Anniversary this year– could be better spent deploying better online tools for communication, education, training, professional networking and remote collaboration. That said, some conferences still play and important role in the work of the aerospace industry and the civilian space program.
How can we cut NASA’s conference budget by two-thirds while maintaining as much of the value of NASA’s conference participation as possible? Two possible solutions to look into include:
- “Mixed-reality” Conferences: this involves remote participants in a virtual world environment interacting with those who are present together at a real-world conference environment. JSC’s Learning Technologies division published a good summary of proof of concept mixed-reality events hosted on NASA CoLab Island in the virtual world of Second Life over the past year. The experiments showed promise in providing a sense of group presence among dozens of remote event participants.
- Holographic Telepresence: Musion Systems and Cisco Systems recently teamed up to demonstrate telepresence on-stage holographic video conferencing. While I know nothing about pricing relative to conference travel, and while CNN was pilloried for its useless use of holograms as a gimmick on Election Night in the US, for [NASA] speakers who may no longer be able to fly around the world to keynote a conference, the technology is impressive.
Keith Cowing on December 13th, 2008
NASA has extensive teleconferencing (video and audio) capabilities that have dedicated satellite systems paid for and ready to use – systems that are underutilized. You just need to call and use them. They work just fine.
Second Life is little more than a pre-Beta fad right now – one wherein participants never use their real names making it impossible to figure who is who, who is saying what, and who represents what organizations. The interaction is slower than traditional video/telecons and is usually interrupted by people wearing silly avatar skins flying around and flapping their wings – behavior that would never be accepted in RL. There are also significant restrictions to Second Life that fly in the face of Sec 508 compliance regs that NASA is required by Law to comply with.
NASA Colab (soon to be phased out or put into hibernation BTW) never attracted participants to SL meetings outside a small group despite lots of fanfare. I cannot decide if this is because of the barriers to participation or the odd aspects of trying to have a “meeting” there.
The options mentioned in this post are solutions looking for a problem. NASA already has ways to do this interaction. To be certain, they are less chic and you don’t get to dress up like a japanese anime character, but they work for a much much larger audience with far less of a learning or entry curve.
Wanna save money? Use video and telecons.
I expect this post to be eliminated soon as have my others since it flies in the face of what the Gen Y crowd wants to believe about a toy they like to play with(in).
rquintanilla on December 14th, 2008
Thanks for the post. Online conferencing is definately the way to go. The new administration plans to spend heavily on broadband, and smartphones are getting so advanced it is just a matter of time before online conferencing becomes the norm.
Jay on December 14th, 2008
Virtual reality conference participation will work about as well as it would in facilitating a relationship with your spouse or child. Save the bandwidth and just read the paper – on line of course…
Chris on December 14th, 2008
One of the most interesting comments in support of industry conferences that I have ever heard goes something like this…
“The most important aspect of a conference is the side conversations and business deals that are made in the conference hallways.”
Having attended five conferences in the past few years, I can say that this statement is certainly true. If you have been to a conference, you will likely have noticed that the opening session is the most attended session of the day. After that, attendance drops significantly for the breakout sessions.
Where might everyone be, you ask? Find the hotel or conference center bar and you’ll find the answer. At the most recent conference I attended, the hotel bar was packed at 10:00am with conference attendees sipping wine or a nice single-malt scotch.
As someone who has presented at a previous conference, I can say that nothing is more discouraging than having a conference paper/presentation accepted, hearing estimates of more than 1,000 conference attendees, and having less than 10 people in your breakout session.
Given that this situation has been repeated at many, many conferences over the years, can you really fault NASA for cutting its spending?
This past year, my motivation to attend industry conferences has declined greatly. Why may that be? For the most part, it is because I am no longer interested in hearing the same talking heads discuss the same tireless topics. If you compare conference schedules for many of the “leading” industry conferences, you will find that each features the same people talking about the same subjects.
Perhaps a better way to spend conference budget would be to invest in a co-working conference. Something which would allow average employees to make a difference. Even if that is too extreme, I would propose that one non-managerial employee be selected to attend the conference for each manager who is paid to attend.
Either way, I hope to see an end to the “coffee break and happy hour” conferences which currently dominate the space industry conference scene.
Nick Skytland on December 15th, 2008
Chris, I really like your idea of a co-working conference! That’s something we should give some more consideration and thought to. Maybe we could host a large scale co-working event for the space industry? Maybe we could do something like that at an X PRIZE Cup next October, at the next IAC, or in conjunction with the ISU Summer Session which will be at Ames this year. We also made some good connections recently with the United Nations and there was some discussion there about doing something similar. A co-working event would be even more valuable if it wasn’t just “space” people – rather an event that included a lot more perspectives. The UN definitely has that! There has also been talk about holding a conference of sorts for “the government”. A co-working event with folks from other government agencies would definitely be of value. Anyway, just a brain dump related to your comment. Thanks for posting!
ahoppin on December 15th, 2008
In re: comment #4, I generally agree about aerospace industry conferences. I just returned from one of the most valuable and inspiring conferences of my life, however– http://www.rootscamp.org. I think a “Barcamp” style open-space format space conference ought to be the future of space industry conferences. We tried some steps in this direction with the Next Generation Exploration Conference II, and the Participatory Exploration Summit at Ames, but we didn’t go all the way… SpaceCamp- in spite of the unfortunate title, who will throw the first one and make it great?
ahoppin on December 15th, 2008
In re: comment #1, absolutely– teleconference and videoconference technologies are mature and effective and should be used whenever they suffice. However, it seems from the title of the recent NASAWatch post (which I linked to in my original post above), that we are in agreement that there is utility in face-to-face convening of people at conferences. In other words, teleconferences and videoconferences, which already exist and are mature technologies, still don’t supplant the desire to attend conferences in-person.
Given that, and given the new circumstance of NASA having to reduce its in-person conference participation, it’s appropriate to explore whether any newer less mature technologies could help bridge this new gap now or in the future, by providing an experience more akin to face-to-face conference participation than is possible through teleconferences and videoconferences. In my own experience, I find that telepresence and other virtual reality technologies, of which there are many vendors and varieties, are able to bridge this gap to some degree even today while they’re less mature technologies. In particular, I’ve found that videoconferences become ineffective with more than five or six participants, whereas virtual reality environments can scale to support hundreds of participants, which is more akin to a conference experience.
Regardless, the intention of this post is to spark discussion about what works, what doesn’t, and what the future may hold that we can begin to plan for today. I’m glad that discussion is being sparked!
Andrew on December 15th, 2008
I don’t think anything is a good enough substitute for attending conferences in person. Attending AIAA conferences for example helps graduate students network, professors to drum up support for their research, and companies to drum up business. The results of NASA research are an important commodity that needs to be shared with the aerospace community, and the best way to get that stuff out there is to publish papers and get NASA employees to present at aerospace conferences.
Cutting the attendance budget limits NASA’s ability to disseminate their research findings, and that negatively affects the aerospace community. We’re getting less bang for our buck.
That said, before they begin exploring asymmetrical holographic tele-projection (patent pending), I think organizations like AIAA and ASME should work with NASA researchers to make it more affordable to attend conferences even out-of-pocket if they need to. Offering steep discounts for conference fees and hotel rooms helps get graduate students at schools with reduced travel budgets to attend conferences, maybe they can offer discounts to NASA employees.
Also, we need to be a little more realistic. Renting telecon equipment and web conferencing equipment at convention centers is a big BIG rip-off. I remember watching Robert Zubrin set up for a talk, and the AV guy at the convention center wanted $100 to rent Zubrin a laserpointer. Imagine how much a speakerphone would cost. Not to mention the minutes.
Robert Howard on February 1st, 2009
This restriction is definitely causing problems. Andrew makes a good point about making conferences more affordable. The National Society of Black Engineers Alumni Extension is hosting its first Aerospace Systems Conference in Los Angeles in February 2010. Aside from the technical and networking value we are trying to achieve and historic value (first African American, aerospace, technical conference), we are definitely making the conference affordable. We are charging only $60 for graduate students and for early bird member-author registration. Our highest registration – late non-member non-author is $200. I’ve been to other industry conferences with registrations of $700 or higher. Of course charging rates this low makes the conference highly dependent on external sponsorship funding and several NASA offices who were initially interested in the conference are now pulling back because of the NASA conference restrictions, unsure if they will be allowed to support it. That of course has a snowball effect on corporations who want to know if NASA will be there.
Ultimately I think this conference restriction is doing more harm than good.