[Aavso-photometry] VO Event network - should we be a part of this?

[Aaron Price]

We are definitely planning to be a part of it. I attended the 2nd NVO Summer School and worked 
on a team to develop the then-nascent VO Event protocol (I was responsible for a basic perl 
client). I presented a poster on our results at an AAS meeting, which you can read here:

The VOEvent Alert Messaging System - Aaron Price (AAVSO), S. L. Allen (UCO/Lick Observatory), 
A. Fhima, J. Garcia (Gemini Observatory), A. Mahabel (Caltech), R. Seaman (NOAO), R. Williams 
(Caltech) and P. B. Warner (NOAO)
http://www.aavso.org/news/voevent-poster-2006.pdf

I was accepted in grad school shortly after the poster was presented and participating in the 
VOEvent working group was one of the things that I had to give up. However, we still plan to 
participate. The program leaders were very supportive of AAVSO participation because we can 
offer them a large quantity and a large variety of events for them to process. One of the 
strengths of the VOEvent protocol is that it is extremely flexible and customizable so you can 
set it up to receive only what you want. Doc has applied for funding to attend this year's NVO 
Summer School. If he is awarded the funding, then he'll represent the AAVSO there. He's 
already begun researching the technical aspects of the VOEvent and NVO systems. If he doesn't 
attend the Summer School then we'll still join the network. But we'll have to pow-wow to 
decide its place in our TODO list.

VOEvent is going to be even more important as we ramp up our participation in LSST in a few 
years. So now is a good time to get involved so we can slowly scale as opposed to jumping into 
a firehose stream already at full pressure (if I can mangle metaphors for a bit).

Aaron