Meetings, meetings, meetings
Posted by Monica Dunford on 10 Nov 2007 at 12:58 pm
Yet another big ‘week’ has passed us by. A few weeks ago it was ‘ATLAS week’, a week of meetings about the detector’s status. This week was ‘Trigger and Physics week’, another week of meetings about all the physics studies being done in preparation for the beam turn-on.
Some friends and I were discussing the volume of meetings within ATLAS. And I thought I might support this discussion with some statistics. This is the 13 year summary of the number of ATLAS meetings registered on our main scheduling website:
Really? Really guys? Did we really have 4531 meetings in the past year? I would have guessed like 1000 per year.
Actually what is shown here is the number of ‘events’ in the past year. For example, Trigger and Physics week which was five full days of meetings is listed as one event in this figure (which makes this figure all that more depressing). Say there are approximately 250 working days at CERN, this would be approximately 18 meetings per day. It baffles me that we actually have that much to talk about!
And since I just couldn’t resist I decided to look at the number of CMS events in the past few years.
947 to ATLAS’ 4531. Hmm.
I think there are two possible explanations here. CMS uses a different scheduling/conference website. This is entirely possible. They might want to avoid having random ATLAS bloggers comb through their meeting statistics. Or. CMS is just more verbally efficient. They say in one word what ATLAS says in four.
It would be interesting to see the monthly statistics but the website doesn’t generate those. This is probably for the greater good of the experiment. People can really get into plotting all the various statistics. And knowing ATLAS, we would probably have to schedule a meeting to discuss the results.
If you were to ask me (and I feel represent the population well for this question), ‘Do you spend too much time in meetings?’ I would say, yes. But if the next question was, ‘Which meetings do you think ATLAS could afford to get rid of?’. I would say, none.
Take Trigger and Physics week. Of the talks that I attended, the information presented was useful and relevant. Meaning that for the most part it was information that I needed to know. Information that I need for the continuation of my own work. I can not point to a single talk that was not worth having. Nor are there many talks that are redundant. Certainly there is some overlap, where one talk might be using as input some work presented elsewhere. But I didn’t feel like I was being told the same thing twice. So maybe 4500 meetings per year is the reality of doing physics in an experiment with 2000 people.
Oh dear, it’s exponential! What will happen when there’s data to talk about…
How many meetings/phone-calls do you personally attend in any given day though? I’m guessing just one per day on average?
And what do you mean by “working days” at CERN? You’re removing more than just weekends there… are you saying days in which people generally work or is CERN actually closed?
Personally I would say that I spend probably 2 hours a day in meetings on average. But during the big ‘weeks’, I will spend either the entire morning or afternoon or both in meetings. And for the most part there is always a big week going on at CERN. This coming week is ‘Muon week’ for example but since I don’t work on the muon system I won’t attend any of those talks.
As for CERN working days, CERN observes some of the official Swiss and French holidays throughout the year. CERN employees usually take the day off. Many American’s don’t take the day off but that might be due to the fact that we have no idea when the Swiss and French holidays are. But there is nothing preventing you from coming into CERN on those days. For two weeks at the end of december, CERN is closed. I have heard that you can technically come in, but it is very, very discouraged. Plus they turn the heat off to most of the buildings, so it is pretty uncomfortable.
“Really? Really guys? Did we really have 4531 meetings in the past year? I would have guessed like 1000 per year. Actually what is shown here is the number of ‘events’ in the past year.”
In other words the luminosity of the LHC bureaucracy is being steadily ramped up?
This may have an incredibly long answer, so feel free to ignore me:
How does the work dynamic compare to your previous work on SNO? Is the TileCal working group your new “collaboration”? Do you feel lost in a sea of meetings? Does working with that many people mean there is enough organization such that it almost feels like *gasp* an industry job?
These are very interesting questions and you are right it IS a long answer. So I will try to answer you in posting.