6
Workshop Wrap-Up
Workshop chair Charlie Marcus offered a short wrap-up to end the day. He began by displaying the “vision board” that Nadya Mason had shown at the beginning of the day (see Figure 2-1). “This was the picture that I put together in an effort to sell this conference to first the committee and then to have the committee sell it upstairs,” he said. “If you look around the chart on this, it ended up being pretty close to the kinds of things that we ended up talking about today.”
One thing that struck him about the workshop, he said, is that all of the discussions, particularly between practitioners of the science, involved genuine inquiries. “They weren’t setups for flattery or citing one’s work,” he said, “and what this reflects to me is the fact that we don’t attend the same conferences, we don’t read the same papers, and in many cases we don’t even know each other personally.” And if there is a sense among the participants that the collection of topics covered at the workshop is a worthwhile part of the field’s future, people will need to start doing a few things differently to ensure that it will be, he said. “It’s going to require some kind of rotation about who attends the April meetings versus who attends the March meetings, who attends what kind of conferences, and who gets invited, and who attends, and what kind of funding mechanisms and group calls there are for proposals to create these communities that can address these questions.”
The fact of the matter is, he continued, that all of the participants are relevant to questions addressed at the workshop even though many of those participants had never met before. “And so I think for me, at least, this conference was a bit of a revolution,” he said. It was the first time that a group of people who all, one way or another, are thinking about and working on coherent systems and networks
were assembled in one place, presenting their work to each other and asking one another hard questions. “It’s my perception that this is a great set of problems with a unity that is just being discovered, and was, I think, enhanced by this meeting.”
He closed by asking for comments from the participants about where they would like to go from here. “Have we found something that we all want to work on, that we want to get together again and see that this becomes a for conferences, for funding, for journal articles or journals, etc.?” After multiple participants answered yes, Marcus adjourned the workshop.
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