(Author’s note (2008/05/20): The talks from NUFO are available online at the host lab’s website.)
NUFO, the National Users Facility Organization, is a group of user representatives from U.S. national laboratories. It’s an ever-solidifying organization whose job, at least in part, is to facilitate dialog among leaders of the user communities, share experiences of users at the labs, and to communicate the value of the scientific enterprise to all stakeholders in this enterprise. Each year, NUFO meets for two days to listen to extended presentations on the above topics and have discussions about these issues. As one of your elected SLUO Executive Committee members and in my role as an officer of the committee, I represented SLAC users at this year’s meeting.
What follows is a digested set of messages and issues that I took away from this meeting. Much of the focus of the first day were messages from Washington D.C., presented to us by government outreach experts from the Chemistry and Physics member societies (ACS and APS). In addition, there were excellent presentations about DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences (BES) perspective on users and interactions with users. We also heard from the nanoscience labs, of which there are five, first proposed in 2001 and all operating by 2006 – an undisputed record for user facilities.
Much of the discussion outside the presentations focused on the Washington issues, so I’ll review those here.
The Supplemental
While momentum for the supplemental is building, it’s still a touch-and-go issue. We were told that the goal is for Congress to conclude the supplemental spending bill by Memorial Day. A possible strategy will be to move the supplemental through the House with no addition for science. The Senate would then add science, and this would all be ironed out in conference with the House (who presumably would not object). This is a good strategy, since the House does not require bi-partisan consensus to pass such an addition to the supplemental, but the Senate does. If the Senate initiates this, then it will automatically have to be bi-partisan (such a coalition of Senators already exists to initiate this).
One word of caution was made on this topic. If the supplemental is pushed through as an emergency supplemental, then it will not count as a re-baseline of FY08. That means that if we entering continuing resolution in October, FY09 would be funded at the current LOWER level rather than the level of the supplemental + the current level. That would be a small disaster, so we should pay attention to whether the Congress tries to label this an emergency supplemental.
The Russian Laptop
The presentation from Pedro Montano, the BES Director of the Scientific User Facilities Division, was frank. While he of course focused entirely on the challenge to the diverse BES facilities, the largest collection in the world of such rich scientific opportunity, I took away a very specific message about the effect of the recent BaBar cancellation.
Since BaBar was planned for shutdown at the end of FY08, BES expected to take full control of the SLAC linac at that time. With the early cancellation of the Babar program, the linac would have to go to BES much sooner than anticipated. That means that all the responsibility for the linac immediately went to BES, but of course the money for that responsibility does not really exist until next year.
Dr. Montano framed this challenge in the clothing of an old joke. Soviet Russia develops the world’s most powerful, most compact laptop. American spies and scientists are absolutely desperate to get their hands on one, and sure enough they manage to identify a Russian politician who can smuggle one out for them. On the day it arrives at a U.S. port, an American agent goes to meet the Russian smuggler. He walks up to the Russian man, who presents him with a small computer no bigger than a textbook. It’s astounding, and the American graciously receives the machine, thanks the man profusely, and turns to leave. “Wait!” calls the Russian, who then reaches into a crate and pulls out two backpacks full of car batteries strapped together and connected in serial to a long cable. “You forgot the batteries!”
While it may seem to many in the HEP community that BES is getting what it wanted a whole lot earlier than planned, this in no way is a real benefit to BES. They have all the responsibility, but none of the funding, to steward the linac as they would want.
This was put succinctly in another presentation: in FY08, “HEP was a target, (BES) was collateral damage.”
A Dollar Well Spent
The clearest message from Washington is that it is easier to say you spend a half-billion on wind energy than on basic research. When push comes to shove in the budget process, basic research is de-prioritized because if you’re going to spend a few hundred million, you can take one sentence to explain spending it on energy but you might have to spend a paragraph explaining why you chose instead to fund basic research.
I think the message here is that all the physical sciences need to make sure they communicate their value in a concise, crisp way. Politicians need a one-liner as to why they would rather spend money on science than application.
Another importance message was that this year, FY09, may be the last year that science gets a chance to be “the prom queen.” By this, I mean that science has been on the Congressional radar for years now, starting with the “Gathering Storm” report and continuing through the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) and the America COMPETES Act (ACA). If there is no action on the path of the ACI or ACA this year, then it is very likely that Congress will drop this next year and it could be 10 years before we get a shot at this again.
User Frustrations
A critical aspect of this meeting is to express user frustrations. While these were largely centered on practices more relevant to the non-HEP applications of user facilities, I will report them here out of interest to the future.
The collection of proposals for review by the facilities is clearly a frustrating thing right now. Users like to submit proposals, but each user facility seems to have its own system, terminology, and level of feedback on the proposal. In the presentations and in the discussions, it was clear that a better level of uniformity in these approaches to accepting and reviewing proposals would be welcome.
Communicating with users is, as always, an evolving challenge. What is clear is that it’s not enough to push information on users (in the form of e-mail or websites); you need to pull information from them (e-mail, surveys, user meetings). In addition, if there doesn’t already exist an association of young researchers at a user facility, user executive committees (like SLUO Exec.) should work to create one.
Conclusions
At first, I was not sure what to expect from this meeting. However, given the richness of experience from the varies user chairs and administrators, as well as the external information provided by BES and member society govt. outreach people, I found this to be a very stimulating meeting.
Apart from the take-away Washington messages – sell the value of basic research, watch the supplemental, make every effort to keep Congress aware of science or we risk losing our visibility for legislation – there were important messages about engaging the users. One of the ideas that I inherited from the experience of other users was about adding more value to the annual users’ meeting. For instance, Argonne’s users meeting will feature the premiere of a play written by a member of the user community, as well as invited vendors who pay to exhibit at the meeting. I think that finding similar value-added items for our user meeting, highlighting research in the community (a poster session) or having a reception which includes an arts event driven from within the user community, could be a fun way to draw more people to the annual meeting.
