[wfc] The end of the road

[Arnold Rots]

Dear colleagues,

I suspect that most of you are aware of the vote that took place in
December 2013,
but I realized that I have been seriously amiss in not passing the result
on to you
officially.

The IAU FWG voted in favor of the change in its voting rules. Although that
sounds
rather innocuous, it has a dramatic impact on the AAS's WGAS FITS
Committee, as we
are officially known; more colloquially, we were the North American
regional FITS
committee.
One of the changes in the IAU Working Group's voting rules was the
elimination of the
regional FITS committees. Ergo, we do not exist anymore.

Thus. it is my task now to convey to you that we have been dismissed.
I would like to thank all of you (and by implication our past members) for
your service.
It has been an important service; our committee has served the community
well and
provided a meaningful contribution during an era when global connectivity
was not
what it is today. The landscape in digital astronomy is dramatically
different from what
it was several decades ago when the WFC was constituted and that change (to
which
we did contribute as well) has made changes in how we develop our standards
inevitable.
Part of that is the obsolescence of the regional committees.

Thank you again and au revoir!

  - Arnold

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Arnold H. Rots                                          Chandra X-ray
Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                   tel:  +1 617 496
7701
60 Garden Street, MS 67                                      fax:  +1 617
495 7356
Cambridge, MA 02138
arots at cfa.harvard.edu
USA
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
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