Most Important Points

The most important task of the Geodesy Program Chair and his/her assistant is to solicit and organize the special sessions. Excuse me, they are called "approved sessions" now, but almost everyone still calls them special sessions. Geodesy typically gets 50-60 general contribution abstracts, and the number of other abstracts is roughly proportional to the number of special sessions. AGU assigns rooms and generally judges how a section is doing by the number of abstracts submitted, so it is important to score a reasonable number for Geodesy.

Solicit people to submit sessions, and twist arms to get more sessions. After that, the most important task is to organize the meeting schedule. The mechanics of that job are now quite simple, but the big task is to avoid conflicts both between Geodesy sessions (a fairly easy job), and between Geodesy sessions and sessions in other sections (harder because we are so multi-disciplinary).

Enjoy the program committee meetings. You will meet a lot of interesting people, and AGU also takes you out to a great dinner or two. Always let Fred Spilhaus choose the restaurant and the wine, and you will have a great meal!

Deadlines

A secret that should not be spread around too much is that most of the deadlines associated with the meeting are flexible. For example, there is a deadline for the submission of special sessions. This falls a couple of weeks before the June planning meeting, and that gives you time to sort through the sessions, combine some if necessary, or create new ones. You may get a great session proposal a day or two after the deadline. Feel free to accept it if you want to and if it will improve the meeting, but let the conveners know that you are making an exception for them and that they can't expect to be late and automatically get their session in. You don't want people to ignore the deadlines because that will make your job, and that of your successors, much harder. I was more forgiving of people who had promised me sessions but could not get it finished until a day or two late.

A few deadlines are not flexible at all. The abstract deadline is absolute. There are not even exceptions made for AGU officers. Also, the schedule for the meeting is set at the September Scheduling Meeting, and can't be altered except for emergencies.

Before the June Planning Meeting

This is when you solicit special sessions, the most important part of your job. A call for sessions will go out in the spring, and as of 2003 AGU set up a web tool for conveners to enter their proposed session. The procedure last year was that the conveners would propose a session to the Program Chair, and if you like it you give them a password they can use to enter it on the web. After the deadline, only you can access the web tool.

The key point here is that they propose, but you approve. Technically, the Program Committee as a whole approves the sessions, but in practice each section's Program Chair has the final say. In general, most session proposals are good enough and don't need more than a little fine-tuning, which you can suggest when they first propose them to you. But don't be afraid to reject a boring session proposal, or one that is poorly thought-out or unfairly biased. If necessary, you can wait until the June meeting and have the overall meeting Program Chair take the heat for you if you need to reject a session (for example, if a cantankerous big shot proposes a totally lame session).

A more common problem is that you will get overlapping session proposals. In this case, you need to try to get the conveners together to combine sessions. If the sessions are really the same idea, it is usually pretty easy because most conveners are reasonable and will work together. Often, proposed sessions will not strictly be overlapping in a scientific sense, but will be overlapping in that they will draw from the same limited pool of presenters. There are only so many distinct sessions you can have at one AGU on Earth Rotation, or Volcano Deformation, or whatever topic you like. These cases are harder, but again most of the time the conveners will be reasonable, and will agree that it is better to have two strong sessions than three weak ones. Give the job to the conveners - ask them if they think that these three sessions can be made into two stronger ones covering the same ground but not splitting it up so finely, and let them propose a solution. If they can't, or if time is too limited to work out a new set of (fewer) sessions, you can always wait until after the abstracts are in to do it, but it is best to work it out earlier.

The most common problem is that you don't get enough proposals. Send out a general email solicitation to email lists that will get to a broad section of people. Make sure that the section President sends out a general solicitation to all G section members. It is a good idea to go over the proposals 7-10 days before the deadline, and have the section President send out another message about a week before the deadline that lists the sessions already proposed and solicits more.

Also, solicit sessions personally. I had some ideas for sessions I wanted to see at the meeting, and I called up some people to ask them if they might be interested in convening a session on such and such topic. Some people would decline, but if you pick the right sort of person, quite often they will take the bait. Then you can stand back and let them define the session as they and their co-conveners choose. You can also propose a session yourself, but I don't recommend that in general. You will have enough to do already for the meeting, and if you also convene a session you have to be careful to avoid any appearance of giving preference to your own session.

Be on the lookout through this process for session proposals that would make good Union sessions. You can propose elevating one of your proposed sessions to Union status at the June meeting. Union sessions should be of broad interest to people in several sections. Take a look at the recent programs to see what kind of things are appropriate for Union sessions.

At the June Planning Meeting

Quite a few things are discussed at the June Planning Meeting. Most involve general input to the program, and may change from year to year. Others are more constant. Union sessions are discussed and approved by the entire Program Committee. One of the Union sessions is the Union Tutorial session, which consists of 4 special 45-minute talks. Think about possible Geodesy candidates for these. We should have one of these every few years. Geoff Blewitt did one on GPS in 2002.

This meeting is also where the list of approved sessions is nominally finalized. You'll need to check with other sections for overlapping sessions, but usually your own sessions are mostly fixed. The list of Union sessions is decided at this meeting, and you may have some session proposals that deserve consideration for Union sessions. Even after this meeting, you can make additions or changes to the list of approved sessions, but it would not be a good idea to accept a totally new session at this point, as that might encourage people to be exceptionally late. However, if discussions at the June meeting make you realize that there really ought to be a session on some topic, that shouldn't stop you from creating it if you think it will make the meeting better. Normally, you just use this time to tie up loose ends, but it can also be used to merge overlapping sessions if you need to. The final list is due to AGU in late June.

Before the September Scheduling Meeting

Some time in July, the session conveners will be asked to submit a proposed list of invited speakers. Once again, the conveners propose and you approve them. Normally, there is no need to overrule the conveners as long as they follow the rule of 4 invited speakers per session. In the past, the AGU web tool for this allowed conveners to enter more than 4 invited speakers so some would violate the rule. Fortunately, they have promised to change this at the request of the Program Committee, so it should not be possible in the future. If a convener wants to invite more than 4 speakers, you probably can allow it but make sure it is for a really good reason, like for a special retrospective session (this is the sort of detailed rule that evolves with time, so check with the rest of the committee at the June meeting).

About a week after the abstract deadline, you will get access to the scheduling tool. Abstracts are sorted by the session they were submitted to, plus the General Contributions. I found that it worked well if I created all of the sessions within the scheduling tool and then pre-assigned the general contribution abstracts to the special sessions as appropriate. At this time I would also look for general contributions that would hang together as a coherent session. This worked well for the 250-300 abstracts that I got, but I might do it differently if I had to deal with 500 abstracts. My reason for doing this was to avoid having conveners fight over contributed abstracts. Abstracts can always be moved. With the current software, you or a convener can move an abstract out of their session into an unclaimed pool, and any convener can take an abstract from the unclaimed pool, but nobody can raid another conveners session.

The scheduling software gets better every year. It takes a few minutes to learn it, and then you can blaze through a lot of sessions quickly. One item of confusion is that there are multiple session names over time. At abstract submission time, sessions are given numbers, like G06 for example. When it is time to schedule, you create a new set of sessions and assign them to be either oral or poster. It first seemed a bit silly to recreate all the sessions, but I think it is actually reasonable that way. There is a way you can import all of the information from a special session/submittal version to a special session/scheduling version. I tried to minimize confusion by using the same names: G06 for an oral version of special session 6, and G06P for the associated poster session. But you can call them different things, if you want to try to keep track. Then after the scheduling meeting, they are renumbered again to the familiar G11A for the first session on Monday morning and so on.

Shortly afterward, you will be assigned a certain number of oral sessions. This is based purely on the number of abstracts. Sections are assigned a percentage of room space for oral sessions based on the section's percentage of the total abstracts submitted. You will then need to decide which sessions get oral+poster, and which get poster only. Starting in 2003, the schedule has been changed from 2 3.5-hour blocks per day to 4 2-hour blocks per day. Typically, each session will get one 2-hour block, although if a session gets a very large number of abstracts it may justify getting 2 blocks. Overall, the 2-hour blocks are a great thing for the Geodesy session, because many of our sessions will get 15-20 abstracts, which just didn't work well with a 12-talk oral session. In any case, you will need to decide how much time each session will get. I generally applied a very simple rule: the sessions with the most abstracts get priority for oral sessions, unless a session with only a few abstracts was so timely or important that it merited special consideration.

What I did was to create a POSTER session for any poster-only sessions, and then ORAL session(s) for any that get oral as well. I moved all of the abstracts into the POSTER session and then contacted the conveners, to let them move the ones they wanted to oral. The one thing to be careful about is that if you do this, you have to create both the oral and poster by "importing" the information with all of the conveners info.

Then I turned things over to the conveners and let them schedule their sessions. I also asked them to look through the list of all sessions (not just Geodesy) and give me a list of sessions that they considered as conflicts with theirs. I would then use this list at the Scheduling Meeting to try to avoid conflicts.

It is also a good idea to think about what you would do if you were able to get an extra room or two to add an oral session. There are actually a few rooms held in reserve by the Program Chair, and you might be able to get one. You also might be able to pick up an extra room at an unpopular time. I actually picked up two extra oral sessions for Geodesy in 2003 because I was ready with two session ideas constructed from approved sessions that did not get enough abstracts (the Advancing the Cutting Edge of Geodesy sessions).

Finally, ask your Geodesy colleagues if they have any suggestions for the cover art for the abstract volume and program. AGU needs two images, one color and one b&w. Not many people make suggestions, so anything you suggest has a decent chance of being chosen. In 2002, AGU had zero suggestions as of the September meeting, so I submitted two of my photos and one was chosen for the program. In 2003, the color cover image also came from a Geodesy section member.

At the September Scheduling Meeting

This is when the meeting finally comes together. If you have followed all of the suggestions I gave above, your job will be mostly done already. All you will have to do is decide when during the week you will place each session. Many of your colleagues on the Program Committee will still be sorting through contributed abstracts and trying to make sessions, so you may need to be patient. There are also a variety of other issues that will be discussed at the meeting, probably a bit different each year.

You will be assigned rooms by the AGU staff. You can trade rooms with other sessions if you like. This used to be a big deal, but in the new Moscone West most of the rooms are the same size so trading is down. If you have a session that you think will draw more than 300 people, you will need to try to trade someone for a bigger room. In 2003, I should have worked harder to get a bigger room for the Bowie Lecture. But in the new facility it is not easy as there are so few bigger rooms.

My strategy was to first schedule the Bowie Lecture. I scheduled it for immediately before the Geodesy section reception (usually Tuesday). I think that worked out nicely. The Bowie Lecture takes up half of a 2-hour block. Then I picked a session that had a lot in common with the Bowie Lecture and gave it the room for the rest of the afternoon (meaning 1.5 of the 2-hour blocks). I made sure that the Program Committee folks from any sections relevant to the Bowie Lecture (S and T for a deformation talk, for example) knew about it so that they could avoid any conflicts.

After that I made a tentative plan and waited until I could talk with the S, T, V, etc. committee members so that we could minimize conflicts. For crustal deformation sessions, there is always a big danger of overlap with S and T, and sometimes V. For other parts of geodesy, it may be H or OS or Cryosphere. In any case, it is worth taking the time to talk things over with the other groups, and try to minimize conflicts from the start. I was surprised how well it worked in 2003, but somehow you always end up with at least one conflict, usually in a field you are not familiar with. That's why I requested the list of conflicts from the conveners, so then I could ask people about specific sessions.

There is an elaborate checkout procedure for when you are done, but AGU will give you instructions about that.

After the September Scheduling Meeting

You will get complaints or requests to move abstracts once the program is out. In general, the answer to requests to move abstracts is "no, that is impossible". But if someone has a really compelling case, you can ask the AGU staff. It is often easier to move a poster than a talk. But if you count up the number of changes listed in the addendums to the program that AGU hands out at the meeting (the colored sheets), much less than 1% of abstracts are moved.

It is likely that someone will complain about something, because no matter how good a job you do, you can't satisfy everyone. A possible first response to complaints is to ask whether the complainer might want to volunteer as the next Program Chair. That will usually quiet down the complainer! Seriously, most people recognize that this is not a simple job, and they will be fairly understanding if you tell them that you did the best you could do. If you take any serious heat from someone, call for backup. The Meeting Program Chair should be willing to step up and take the criticism for you. This actually happened a couple of times when I was on the committee (in other sections), when a big shot got bent out of shape about being assigned to a poster, or not getting enough oral time for his session. Part of the job of the overall Program Chair is to stand up for committee members who need support.

At the Fall Meeting

You will be asked to attend a lunch meeting on the last day of the meeting. This is mostly a wrap-up discussion on how things went, what worked and what didn't, and what should be done next time. It will also generally feature good food and wine, so don't miss it! Other than that, you get a special ribbon on your name badge, and you can either bask in the glory or hide from the complainants. But, besides going to the final lunch there is really not much you have do at the meeting, so enjoy it.

Jeff Freymueller
University of Alaska Fairbanks
AGU Fall Meeting Program Chair 2002-2003