What is an unsession?

Yesterday I invited you (yes, you) to our Unsolved Problems Unsession on 7 May in Calgary. What exactly will be involved? We think we can accomplish two things:

1. Brainstorm the top 10, or 20, or 50 most pressing problems in exploration geoscience today. Not limited to but focusing on those problems that affect how well we interface — with each other, with engineers, with financial people, with the public even. Integration problems.
2. Select one or two of those problems and solve them! Well, not solve them, but explore ways to approach solving them. What might a solution be worth? How many disciplines does it touch? How long might it take? Where could we start? Who can help?

There are bright, energetic young people out there looking for relevant problems to work on towards a Master's or PhD. There are entrepreneurs looking for high-value problems to create a new business from. And software companies looking for ways to be more useful and relevant to their users. And there is more than one interpreter wishing that innovation would speed up a bit in our industry and make their work a little — or a lot — easier. 

We don't know where it will lead, but we think this unsession is one way to get some conversations going. This is not a session to dip in and out of — we need 4 hours of your time. Bring your experience, your uniqueness, and your curiosity.

Let's reboot our imaginations about what we can do in our science.

An invitation to a brainstorm

Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden; to cast a glance at the next advances of our science and at the secrets of its development during future centuries? What particular goals will there be toward which the leading [geoscientific] spirits of coming generations will strive? What new methods and new facts in the wide and rich field of [geoscientific] thought will the new centuries disclose?

— Adapted from David Hilbert (1902). Mathematical Problems, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 8 (10), p 437–479. Originally appeared in in Göttinger Nachrichten, 1900, pp. 253–297.

Back at the end of October, just before the SEG Annual Meeting, I did some whining about conferences: so many amazing, creative, energetic geoscientists, doing too much listening and not enough doing. The next day, I proposed some ways to make conferences for productive — for us as scientists, and for our science itself. 

Evan and I are chairing a new kind of session at the Calgary GeoConvention this year. What does ‘new kind of session’ mean? Here’s the lowdown:

The Unsolved Problems Unsession at the 2013 GeoConvention will transform conference attendees, normally little more than spectators, into active participants and collaborators. We are gathering 60 of the brightest, sparkiest minds in exploration geoscience to debate the open questions in our field, and create new approaches to solving them. The nearly 4-hour session will look, feel, and function unlike any other session at the conference. The outcome will be a list of real problems that affect our daily work as subsurface professionals — especially those in the hard-to-reach spots between our disciplines. Come and help shed some light, room 101, Tuesday 7 May, 8:00 till 11:45.

What you can do

• Where does your workflow stumble? Think up the most pressing unsolved problems in your workflows — especially ones that slow down collaboration between the disciplines. They might be organizational, they might be technological, they might be scientific.
• Put 7 May in your calendar and come to our session! Better yet, bring a friend. We can accommodate about 60 people. Be one of the first to experience a new kind of session!
• If you would like to help host the event, we're looking for 5 enthusiastic volunteers to play a slightly enlarged role, helping guide the brainstorming and capture the goodness. You know who you are. Email hello@agilegeoscience.com. 

Dream geoscience courses

MOOCs mean it's never been easier to learn something new.This is an appeal for opinions. Please share your experiences and points of view in the comments.

Are you planning to take any technical courses this year? Are you satisfied with the range of courses offered by your company, or the technical societies, or the commercial training houses (PetroSkills, Nautilus, and so on)? And how do you choose which ones to take — do you just pick what you fancy, seek recommendations, or simply aim for field classes at low latitudes?

At the end of 2012, several geobloggers wrote about courses they'd like to take. Some of them sounded excellent to me too... which of these would you take a week off work for?

• Programming in geology — Shawn Wright of Vi-Carius
• Working the government/academia/industry system — Shawn Wright
• Art for geologists — proposed by Callan Bentley at Mountain Beltway
• The roots of geological thinking — both Callan Bentley and Shawn Wright
• Offshore geologic site assessment — Dianna Phu at Eat. Sleep. Geology.
• Geoscience 999: a short, sharp shock — Pete Rowley at Lithics
• Ballparking — Pete Rowley
• Field methods theory — Penny Higgins at Paleopix
• Investing in economic deposits — Ann at Ann's Musings
• Geology, history, and legend — Hollis at In the Company of Plants & Rocks
• Earth systems & society — Lockwood Dewitt at Outside the Interzone

Here's my own list, complete with instructors. It includes some of the same themes...

• Programming for geoscientists (learn to program!) — Eric Jones
• Solving hard problems about the earth — hm, that's a tough one... Bill Goodway?
• Communicating rocks online — Brian Romans or Maitri Erwin
• Data-driven graphics in geoscience — the figure editor at Nature Geoscience
• Mathematics clinic for geoscientists — Brian Russell
• Becoming a GIS ninja — er, a GIS ninja
• Working for yourself — needs multiple points of view

What do you think? What's your dream course? Who would teach it?

You own your brain

I met someone last week who said her employer — a large integrated oil & gas company — 'owned her'. She said she'd signed an employment agreement that unequivocally spelt this out. This person was certainly a professional on paper, with a graduate degree and plenty of experience. But the company had, perhaps unwittingly, robbed her of her professional independence and self-determination. What a thing to lose.

Agreements like this erode our profession. Do not sign agreements like this. 

The idea that a corporation can own a person is obviously ludicrous — I'm certain she didn't mean it literally. But I think lots of people feel confined by their employment. For some reason, it's acceptable to gossip and whisper over coffee, but talking in any public way about our work is uncomfortable for some people. This needs to change.

Your employer owns your products. They pay you for concerted effort on things they need, and to have their socks knocked off occasionally. But they don't own your creativity, judgment, insight, and ideas — the things that make you a professional. They own their data, and their tools, and their processes, but they don't own the people or the intellects that created them. And they can't — or shouldn't be able to — stop you from going out into the world and being an active, engaged professional, free to exerise and discuss our science with whomever you like.

If you're asked to sign something saying you can't talk at meetings, write about your work, or contribute to open projects like SEGwiki — stop.

These contracts only exist because people sign them. Just say, 'No. I am a professional. I own my brain.'

Ways to experiment with conferences

Yesterday I wrote about why I think technical conferences underdeliver. Coincidentally, Evan sent me this quote from Seth Godin's blog yesterday:

We've all been offered access to so many tools, so many valuable connections, so many committed people. What an opportunity.

What should we do about it? 

If we are collectively spending 6 careers at the SEG Annual Meeting every autumn, as I asserted yesterday, let's put some of that cognitive surplus to work!

I suggest starting to experiment with our conferences. There are so many tools: unconferences, idea jams, hackdays, wikithons, and other participative activities. Anything to break up sitting in the dark watching 16 lectures a day, slamming coffee and cramming posters in between. Anything to get people not just talking and drinking, but working together. What a way to build collaborations, friendships, and trust. Connecting with humans, not business cards. 

Unconvinced? consider which of these groups of people looks like they're learning, being productive, and having fun:

This year I've been to some random (for me) conferences — Science Online, Wikimania, and Strata. Here are some engaging, fun, and inspiring things happening in meetings of those communities:

• Speaker 'office hours' during the breaks so you can find them and ask questions. 
• Self-selected topical discussion tables at lunch. 
• Actual time for actual discussion after talks (no, really!).
• Cool giveaways: tattoos and stickers, funky notebooks, useful mobile apps, books, scientific toys.
• A chance to sit down and work with others — hackathons, co-writing, idea jams, and so on. 
• Engaged, relevant, grounded social media presence, not more marketing.
• An art gallery, including graphics captured during sessions. 
• No posters! Those things epitomize the churn of one-way communication.

Come to our experiment!

Clearly there's no shortage of things to try. Converting a session here, a workshop there — it's easy to do something in a sandbox, alongside the traditional. And by 'easy', I mean uncertain, risky and uncomfortable. It will require a new kind of openness. I'm not certain of the outcome, but I am certain that it's worth doing. 

On this note, a wonderful thing happened to us recently. We were — and still are — planning an unconference of our own (stay tuned for that). Then, quite unprovoked, Carmen Dumitrescu asked Evan if we'd like to chair a session at the Canada GeoConvention in May. And she invited us to 'do something different'. Perfect timing!

So — mark your calendar! GeoConvention, Calgary, May 2013. Something different.

The photo of the lecture, from the depressing point of view of the speaker, is licensed CC-BY-SA by Flickr user Pierre-Alain Dorange. The one of the unconference is licensed CC-BY-SA-NC by Flickr user aforgrave.