Postmortem of the 2007
Technical Program

Bob Hardage
Technical Program Committee chairman

3 October 2007— One must be careful about tooting your horn, but I conclude that the 2007 SEG Technical Program was one of the best ever. The success was not because of me as chairman of the Technical Program Committee, but by the 30 members of the committee that I recruited to supervise the abstract reviews and the creation of the technical sessions, the 600-plus people who reviewed the abstracts we received, the SEG staff that I worked with, and the Research Committee who organized the Workshops.

Other than comments from rejected authors, the only complaint I heard about the technical program was, “we cannot get everyone into the room who came to hear the papers.” The usual room sizes were just not big enough for this crowd in San Antonio; and that is a good problem to have.

Poster location
Our decision to place the posters in the direct path that people had to travel as they moved from the Exhibition Hall to the technical sessions turned out to be good. Several traditional and regular-as-clockwork critics came to me and said, “Best poster effort ever.” We did have too much pedestrian chatter as people passed through the poster area during the first half-day of poster sessions, but that noise problem abated to acceptable levels after we placed more “Quiet!!” signs at appropriate locations.

Workshop attendance
The workshops were a pleasant surprise. Anecdotally I understand the largest number of people who have attended workshops has been about 800 (I have no hard data). A common number for attendance is about 600 (again anecdotal information). More than 1200 people attended the workshops in San Antonio.

This attendance is a record, and SEG 2007 has set the standard for other annual meetings to try to top. We had to adjust to larger rooms for some workshops to placate the Fire Marshall, and we ran out of name tags and ribbons. This doubling of workshop attendees at San Antonio should be credited to the Research Committee to whom I assigned the authority to organize the entire workshop portion of the technical program. I simply monitored their progress and occasionally offered advice.

In summary, it appears that the people who attended the 2007 Annual Meeting came with the intent to be more involved and engaged in the technical program than has been our past experience. The high quality of the posters, papers, and workshops no doubt was one catalyst that contributed to this increased level of participation by our attendees.

Related Link: SEG Annual Meeting 2007 News and Photos Index
SEG 2007 Expanded Abstracts
SEG Annual Meeting Home Page