Ames Federal Employees Union

The Ames Federal Employees Union has requested negotiations of the NOMAD implementation at Ames Research Center in order to ensure that reasonable accommodations are provided for employees and the impact on their ability to perform their work is minimized. Employees with comments and concerns should address them to the VP for Negotiations or add comments to the blog.

—The request from the VP—

Dear Mike,

I hereby request I&I negotiations of the NOMAD e-mail and calendar system. Issues have come to light based on the town hall meeting on July 26, 2007. Theses include, but are not limited to,

1. cost - who will bear the burden of the $250/seat impact?
2. guarantees of platform support (Windows, Mac, Linux, other)
3. ensuring the privacy of e-mails
4. ensuring access from home and on travel
5. preserving e-mail forwarding for a sufficient duration
6. sending/receiving of attachments outside NASA
7. general reliability and employee responsibility and protections
8. contractual questions needing to be clarified (article V, sections 1,6,12,13)

Since ODIN will be responsible for the operation of NOMAD, some aspects of this are covered by the negotiated agreement of Aug. 11, 2000.

We hope that management will carry out negotiations in good faith, and make appropriate arrangements  to mitigate the impact on employees of the new policy.

Sincerely,
David

So are we, and the Union is going to be requesting negotiations on the impact and implementation of the switchover to NOMAD. Some of what we are already concerned about include:

• financial impacts to the end-users
• privacy of e-mails and rights of employees to be notified when their e-mail is being inspected
• protections for employees adversely affected by performance and reliability issues
• guarantees of support for a variety of tools and platforms (i.e. Linux, Thunderbird, etc.)
• guarantees of support for e-mail forwarding for old e-mail addresses
• discussions of space allowances and limitations

This is an opportunity for you to raise your issues and to have the Union negotiate with management on reasonable accommodation to your issues. Either add a comment to this blog entry (comments are moderated, so they may not show up immediately) or send e-mail to negotiate@afeu.org .

– Your AFEU NOMAD Negotiations Team