Let me express my surprise after todays session of “walk-through talks”. As we discussed in detail during our last call and as Anita reminded everybody at the beginning of the session, this presentation format and this session was meant for analyses in an advanced stage, for which the A&R review has been concluded, for which the main results are ready and for which a publication is expected shortly. 

I was quite puzzled to see that roughly half of the presented talks did not match these criteria (for me the Vela, N132D and HEGS talks were the only ones somewhat justified). I think we need to understand what went wrong here. Was this due to a misunderstanding? Misunderstanding about the aim of WT talks or the status of the presented analyses? At the side of the conveners who proposed the talks? Or a miscommunication from the task leaders towards the conveners about the task status? Something else?

In any case, I believe we should strive to avoid this confusion in the future. It is extremely frustrating for tasks that were denied a WT talk this time because they did not fully comply with the mentioned requirements to see others, at a less advanced stage, being presented. I also believe we will have to redo proper WT talk once the analyses will have reached that stage. Let me be clear: I am not saying that the talks today were a waste of time! An update on the presented tasks was certainly helpful and necessary. They were just not at the stage required within the publication scheme for the collaboration walk-through.

Cheers,

Fabian