[Peter Wittenburg]

Jamie also asked why the chairs meetings are only in the US and in EU – let me try to give an answer.
Plenaries are “official meetings” while the chairs meetings started purely bottom-up. A couple of chairs found that they should meet and we organised a first one in Munich fully paid by MPG. After having discussed the focus we of course invited some chairs from the US since they were the experts on certain topics. There were no other chairs than from US and EU at that time. And please understand Jamie: RDA is a bottom-up organisation – we did not ask anyone for permission or so. We just did it to remove some barriers knowing that a chairs meeting may not interfere with the official RDA processes.
Since this meeting was perceived as being very good, these crazy guys including me decided to go ahead with them. It is not quite fair but Ross, Andrew and the others may forgive us that until now no one came on the idea to travel around the globe. We want to try to keep them short and simple and kind of cheap. But as said yet no one asked to do one in China for example. Let’s make it also very clear: chairs meetings are small working meetings and you cannot get any big prestige with it.
A poor answer of course, but I like the bottom-up way of RDA so much that I hope that all including you will forgive me and the others that we were and are not globally balanced 🙂
PS: But let me ask you bluntly since you brought it up: Is there anything miss with the chairs meetings and the selection processes?
Peter

Discussion

[Jamie Shiers]

Dear Peter,
Thank you for providing this explanation in addition to that from Larry.
However, this is just an example. I believe that total transparency is important in all areas. (Not just choice of location for WG chairs meetings).
Is there any reason why, in the case of this example, the information cannot be more widely shared? (e.g. at least with the OAB if not all?)
Cheers and happy holidays, Jamie
On 04 May 2016, at 22:41, Wittenburg, Peter wrote:
Jamie also asked why the chairs meetings are only in the US and in EU – let me try to give an answer.
Plenaries are “official meetings” while the chairs meetings started purely bottom-up. A couple of chairs found that they should meet and we organised a first one in Munich fully paid by MPG. After having discussed the focus we of course invited some chairs from the US since they were the experts on certain topics. There were no other chairs than from US and EU at that time. And please understand Jamie: RDA is a bottom-up organisation – we did not ask anyone for permission or so. We just did it to remove some barriers knowing that a chairs meeting may not interfere with the official RDA processes.
Since this meeting was perceived as being very good, these crazy guys including me decided to go ahead with them. It is not quite fair but Ross, Andrew and the others may forgive us that until now no one came on the idea to travel around the globe. We want to try to keep them short and simple and kind of cheap. But as said yet no one asked to do one in China for example. Let’s make it also very clear: chairs meetings are small working meetings and you cannot get any big prestige with it.
A poor answer of course, but I like the bottom-up way of RDA so much that I hope that all including you will forgive me and the others that we were and are not globally balanced 🙂
PS: But let me ask you bluntly since you brought it up: Is there anything miss with the chairs meetings and the selection processes?
Peter

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