[X] My Assistant

[imran]

Jason,

Are you really shutting down this site? I must say I'm really sad to hear this. (((
It was one of my favorite sites and I relied on it for up-to-date news on Titan and the Cassini Mission. I just want to commend you for your great work and hope you keep providing us with your valuable insights here. Keep up the good work Jason!

[djellison]

I think it's very very sad that what ever happened, happened - and we've all lost out because of it. No one was trying to steal any scientific thunder - we just wanted to share the adventure. In the MER world, our efforts are praised and enjoyed by team members. It seems things change once you go beyond the asteroid belt

I'm not sure if it will do any good, or if it's worthwhile - but I'm going to email a few people to say that Jasons efforts were appreciated, enjoyed, of great benefit to the project as a whole, and the demise of his blog is a very sad and unfortunate thing. No one is trying to steal any scientific thunder - we're just trying to share in this amazing adventure, a billion miles from home.

So - avoiding a rant, just expressing sadness, I'm emailing

Project Manager (Bob Mitchell) - Robert.T.Mitchell@jpl.nasa.gov
Project Scientist (Dennis Matson) - Dennis.L.Matson@jpl.nasa.gov
Deputy Scientist (Linda Spilker) - Linda.J.Spilker@jpl.nasa.gov
and
Public Information Officer (Carolina Martinez) - Carolina.Carnalla-Martinez@jpl.nasa.gov

Those email addresses might be wrong, alternatives are...
rmitchel@mail.jpl.nasa.gov , dlmatson@mail.jpl.nasa.gov , lspilker@mail.jpl.nasa.gov , carnalla@mail.jpl.nasa.gov

If nothing else, Jason deserves praise for his brilliant work that did nothing but give credit to what is an amazing mission - and if anything can be done to find out what caused what I consider to be a tragic mistake for the mission's outreach efforts -all the better.

You are a credit to the whole mission Jason, and for that, you deserve praise and congratulations.


Doug

[odave]

I'm not sure if it will do any good, or if it's worthwhile - but I'm going to email a few people to say that Jasons efforts were appreciated, enjoyed, of great benefit to the project as a whole

I think this is the best kind action we can take - make sure those higer up the food chain understand how talented he is both at his job *and* public outreach. I wouldn't want him to be tagged as a "troublemaker" and his career (or his attitude) damaged by this incident, whatever it was. Let's cover our brother's back.

I would make sure to keep the content of the message positive and respectful, as ranting from the Internet can be so easily dismissed.

I am considering a veiled threat, however - something along the lines of "You guys get a lot of money from the government, right? I pay taxes. I also vote."

Just kidding......kind of...

[helvick]

I think this is the best kind action we can take - make sure those higer up the food chain understand how talented he is both at his job *and* public outreach.  I wouldn't want him to be tagged as a "troublemaker" and his career (or his attitude) damaged by this incident, whatever it was.  Let's cover our brother's back.

Yep - this is arguably the only sensible way to do this. I understand both sides of the argument and the difficulty here is that you are dealing with both standard organisational politics and those peculiar to scientific mega projects.

The effect of Jason's blog was to provide an outstanding public outreach resource for folks like use, those who want much more detail and want to share (albeit at some remove) in the spirit of exploration and discovery. We are arguably a very important group of stakeholders in the broad sense as taxpayers from all countries who have funded this project. In the long term it is very much in the interest of those whose careers depend on publically funded space exploration to acknowledge that.

However it is hard to balance that with the more immediate requirements of a scientific project on the scale of Cassini. Multiple large groups of scientific teams who have spent a large portion of their career lifetimes working on the various parts of the mission. The management of the mission must protect both the integrity of the mission as a project and protect the right of the participants to ensure that the information being disseminated about the project and their experiments is correct.

I think it's important to acknowledge that there are good reasons for people to be cautious about excessively open information policies. Now just having good reasons to be cautious doesn't mean that it's a good idea to shut off all access but that is often the easiest thing to do. The best way to get the people in control to make the harder decisions that are both beneficial to the project's priorities and to interest groups like ours is to communicate calmly and clearly with them, ideally by having someone with a bit of clout doing the actual communicating.

Finally we all need to pay attention to the fact that this was a decision that Jason made himself and thus far I've seen no indication that he was pressured directly into making it. Clearly he didn't want to do it but we are lacking some very important information at the moment - specifically the exact reasons why he felt he needed to shut down.