Category: Scipoli

As a member of the SLUO executive committee and co-chair of the Washington D.C. Trip subcommittee, I wanted to update people on the status of our annual trip to DC. There are currently 11 members of the team going to DC, representing diverse areas of the SLAC PPA user community: astronomy and astrophysics, collider physics, and neutrino physics. SLAC is part of a larger multi-team effort, representing users at SLAC and FNAL and in the US-LHC community. In total, there are about 45 people going, targeting about 220 Congressional offices.

Our focus will be the FY10 budget. FY09 is a done deal, and the stimulus is old news. Our focus is to keep up the effort in Congress to fund science as a priority, in the face of growing deficits and difficult political realities. We will communicate the nature and value of our work, its impact on districts, states, and the nation, and call for continued commitment to the doubling of the combined physical sciences budgets in NIST, NSF, and DOE as envisioned in the America COMPETES Act (ACA). The Congress authorized this doubling over 7 years, and the FY09 budget represented the first step in the commitment to that goal.

In the face of economic turmoil and competing political interests, we are eager to stress the power of curiosity-driven research to educate and train the next generation of leaders in science, technology, and many other areas of economic interest. We are excited to share a little about our work, hear what the Congress has to say  – their fears, their concerns, their priorities – and continue a conversation that, we hope, will serve as a relationship between Congress and the science they fund.

The trip is April 28-May 1. If you have ideas or comments, you can send them to sluo.dc@gmail.com.

Back in 2005, just after the March Washington lobbying effort by SLAC and Fermilab users, a few of us at SLAC decided to setup a website that could serve as a hub for political action by scientists. It was intended to be a resource more than an organization (unlike SEA, which formed later), a means to raise issues about pending science policy decisions and call for action by scientists on those issues. From the desire to have such a site, scienceaction.org was born.

After the NUFO meeting last week, I came to realize that while scienceaction.org never took off, there is still a latent demand out there for such a resource. Users’ organizations, based at government labs and seeking non-government resources to express their needs to politicians, are in a tough position. They need a site they can use to create letters, call for action, and circulate news about the current status of U.S. science funding policy and activity.

I revamped the site over the weekend, migrating from the old Zope site to a more modern web framework.

I invite all interested parties to contact me about becoming “correspondents” for the site. Your role would then be to post news you find or hear, initiate calls to action from subscribers to the site, and spread the word about the need for all scientists to be citizen scientists.

The software is also going to migrate to the new framework, allowing issue letters to be created and then tracked on calls to action. My goal is to provide a flexible set of tools to establish such letters, get them to the community, and estimate how many people are trying to send these letters.

What follows is my own high-level summary of the lessons from the Fermilab/SLAC/U.S. LHC users’ joint trip to Washington DC. I then conclude with my thoughts on the way forward. These thoughts are distilled from my experiences, and some of the experiences of others, during the trip.

Continue reading “Messages from Washington”