Face-to-face meeting at TPAC **cancelled**

Dear all,

I am sorry to announce that we are going to cancel our face-to-face meeting at TPAC.

After spending yesterday talking to many of you individually, it became unequivocally clear that:

* Most key participants, including our editors and most participants with expertise in tests, will not be travelling to TPAC
* All but one of the people who already signed up for the meeting were planning to attend other meetings too

Face-to-face meetings are key to working group progress, getting to know each others and working effectively as a group. They are part of the commitment we our organisations all made when joining the group, and should not be considered optional.

I have to stress how disappointed I am –– that in spite of holding a survey to record everyone's plans several months ago, countless calls in email or teleconference for group members to register or send regrets since, I had to nag quite a few people directly to get an answer about whether they planned to go at all. 

To the rest of the group, as chair, I sincerely apologise for failing to secure enough people to make this meeting a success. 

I know a fair few of you were hoping to join through telepresence of a kind, but having more people on the phone than in the room would not be a reasonable and effective use of f2f time. 

We should now see if there is enough interest for a different face to face meeting in the next few months. If anyone in the group would like to host it, please get in touch with me.

In the meantime, remember we have a teleconference in a few hours. Talk to you there.

Thank you,
Olivier