The new open geophysics tools

The hackathon in Denver was more than 6 weeks ago. I kept thinking, "Oh, I must post a review of what went down" (beyond the quick wrap-up I did at the time), but while I'm a firm believer in procrastination six weeks seems unreasonable... Maybe it's taken this long to scrub down to the lasting lessons. Before those, I want to tell you who the teams were, what they did, and where you can find their (100% open source!) stuff. Enjoy!

Geophys Wiz

Andrew Pethick, Josh Poirier, Colton Kohnke, Katerina Gonzales, and Elijah Thomas — GitHub repo

This team had no trouble coming up with ideas — perhaps a reflection of their composition, which was more heterogeneous than the other teams. Josh is at NEOS, the consulting and software firm, and Andrew is a postdoc at Curtin in Perth, Australia, while the other 3 are students at Mines. The team eventually settled on building MT Black Box, a magnetotellurics modeling web application. 

Last thing: Don't miss Andrew Pethick's write-up of the event. 

Seemingly Concerned Neighbours

Elias Arias, Brent Putman, Thomas Rapstine, and Gabriel Martinez — Github repo

These four young geophysicists from the Colorado School of Mines impressed everyone with their work ethic. Their tight-knit team came in with a plan, and proceeded to scribble up the coolest-looking whiteboard of the weekend. After learning some Android development skills 'earlier this week', they pulled together a great little app for forward modeling magnetotelluric responses. 

Well tie guys

Michaël Montouchet, Graham Dawes, Mark Roberts

It was terrific to have pro coders Graham and Michaël with us — they flew from the UK to be with us, thanks to their employer and generous sponsor ffA GeoTeric. They hooked up with Mark, a Denver geophysicist and developer, and hacked on a well-tie web application, rightly identifying a gap in the open source market, so to speak (there is precious little out there for well-based workflows). They may have bitten off more than they could chew in just 2 days, so I hope we can get together with them again to finish it off. Who's up for a European hackathon? 

Five hour wonders

Rowan Cockett and Seogi Kang — GitHub repo for SimPEG

These two characters from UBC didn't get going till Sunday morning, but in just five hours they built a sweet web app for forward modeling the DC resistivity response of a buried disk. They weren't starting from scratch, because Rowan and others have spent months honing SimPEG, a rich open-source geophysical library, but minds were nonetheless blown.

Key takeaway: interactivity beyond sliders for the win.

Pick This!

Ben Bougher, Jacob Foshee, Evan Bianco, and an immiscible mixture of Chris Chalcraft and me — GitHub repo

Wouldn't you sometimes like to know how other people would interpret the section you're working on? This team, a reprise of the dream team from Houston in 2013, built a simple way to share images and invite others to interpret them. When someone has completed their interpretation, only then do they get to see the ensemble — everyone else's interpretations — in a heatmap. Not only did this team demo live software at pickthis.io, but the audience provided the first crowdsourced picks in real time. 

We'll be blogging more about Pick This soon. We're actively seeking ideas, images, interpreters, and financial support. Keep an eye out.

What I learned at this hackathon

• Potential fields are an actual thing! OK, kidding, but three out of five teams built potential field modeling tools. I wasn't expecting that, and I think the judges were impressed at the breadth. 
• 30 hours is easily enough time to build something pretty cool. Heck, 5 hours is enough if you're made of the right stuff. 
• Students can happily build prototypes alongside professional developers, and even teach them a thing or two. And vice versa. Are hackathons a leveller of playing fields?
• We need to remove the road blocks to more people enjoying this event. To help with this, next time there will be a 1-day bootcamp before the hackathon.
• After virtually doubling in size from 2013 to 2014, it's clear that the 2015 Hackathon in New Orleans is going to be awesome! Mark your calendar: 17 and 18 October 2015.

Thank you!

Thank you to the creative, energetic geophysicists that came. It was a privilege to meet and hack with you!

Thank you to the judges who gave up their Sunday teatime to watch the demos and give precious feedback to the teams: Steve Adcock, Jamie Allison, Maitri Erwin, Dennis Cooke, Chris Krohn, Shannon Bjarnason, David Holmes, and Tracy Stark. Amazing people, one and all.

A final Thank You to our sponsors — dGB Earth Sciences, ffA GeoTeric, and OpenGeoSolutions. You guys are totally awesome! Seriously.

Another 52 Things hits the shelves

The new book is out today: 52 Things You Should Know About Palaeontology. Having been up for pre-order in the US, it is now shipping. The book will appear in Amazons globally in the next 24 hours or so, perhaps a bit longer for Canada.

I'm very proud of this volume. It shows that 52 Things has legs, and the quality is as high as ever. Euan Clarkson knows a thing or two about fossils and about books, and here's what he thought of it: 

This is sheer delight for the reader, with a great range of short but fascinating articles; serious science but often funny. Altogether brilliant!

Each purchase benefits The Micropalaeontological Society's Educational Trust, a UK charity, for the furthering of postgraduate education in microfossils. You should probably go and buy it now before it runs out. Go on, I'll wait here...

1000 years of fossil obsession

So what's in the book? There's too much variety to describe. Dinosaurs, plants, foraminifera, arthropods — they're all in there. There's a geographical index, as before, and also a chronostratigraphic one. The geography shows some distinct clustering, that partly reflects the emphasis on the science of applied fossil-gazing: biostratigraphy. 

The book has 48 authors, a new record for these collections. It's an honour to work with each of them — their passion, commitment, and professionalism positively shines from the pages. Geologists and fossil nuts alike will recognize many of the names, though some will, I hope, be new to you. As a group, these scientists represent  1000 years of experience!

---

Amazingly, and completely by chance, it is one year to the day since we announced 52 Things You Should Know About Geology. Sales of that book benefit The AAPG Foundation, so today I am delighted to be sending a cheque for $1280 to them in Tulsa. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy, and of course to the authors of that book for making it happen.

Two sides to every story?

We all have our biases.

Ovation, a data management company, set up a sexy shoeshine stand again this year at the SEG Annual Meeting, a science & technology meeting for subsurface professionals. This cynical and spurious subordination of women by a technology company in our community should be addressed by the immediate adoption of a code of conduct by SEG.		Ovation wants to liven up a boring tradeshow. They hired a small business, owned and run by women, to provide their customers and prospects with shiny shoes. The women are smart to capitalize on their looks to make a living. Anyone who thinks they're being exploited, or that this is an inappropriate way to attract customers at a scientific conference, needs to get over themselves.
Last year I picked on one of the marketing strategies employed by SeisWare, a Calgary software company. I implied that the women in fitted dresses handing out beer tickets were probably marketing consultants, not scientists, and I was not alone in my misgivings. My interpretation was that the sexy gimmick was a stand-in for more geophysics-based engagement, something many vendors are afraid of.		On Tuesday, one of SeisWare's geologists called me out on this. On Twitter, in the open, where these conversations belong. She was one of the women in tight dresses; the others were also geoscientists. She had chosen the dresses, felt great about them, and been excited about the chance to represent the company and look awesome doing it. She was saddened and frustrated by the negative remarks about those choices. I need to check my assumptions next time.
Evan and I went to the excellently named Euclid Hall on Monday evening. It was full; whilst waiting, the maître d' told us the place was full of exploration geophysicists, to which we replied that we were geophysicists too. She went on to say that she was studying the subject at CU, prompting a high-five from Evan. Then she said, "I shouldn't say this, but I worry that I won't be taken seriously, because I'm a girl."

 

What's the other side to this story?

The most epic geophysics hackathon in the world, ever

Words can't express how awesome the 2014 Geophysics Hackthon was. The spirit embodied by the participants is shared by our generous sponsors... the deliberate practice of creativity and collaboration. 

We convened at Thrive, a fantastic coworking space in the hip Lower Downtown district of Denver. Their friendly staff went well beyond their duty in accommodating our group. The abundance of eateries and bars makes it perfect for an event like this, especially when the organization is a bit, er, spontaneous.

We opened the doors at 8 on Saturday morning and put the coffee and breakfast out, without any firm idea of how many people would show up. But by 9 a sizeable cohort of undergrads and grad students from the Colorado School of Mines had already convened around projects, while others trickled in. The way these students showed up, took ownership, and rolled up their sleeves was inspiring. A few folks even spent last week learning Android in order to put their ideas on a mobile device. While at times we encounter examples that have caused us to wonder if we are going to be alright, these folks, with their audacity and wholesomeness, revive faith that we will. 

The theme of the event was resolution, but really the brief was wide open. There was a lot of non-seismic geophysics, a lot of interactive widgets ('slide this to change the thickness; slide that to change the resistivity'), and a lot of novel approaches. In a week or two we'll be posting a thorough review of the projects the 6 teams built, so stay tuned for that.

The photos are all on Flickr, or you can visit our Hashpi.pe for the captions and other tweetage.

Another great outcome was that all of the projects are open source. Several of the projects highlighted the escape-velocity innovation that is possible when you have an open platform behind you. The potential impact of tools like Mines JTK, SimPEG, and Madagascar is huge. Our community must not underestimate the super-powers these frameworks give us.

The hackathon will be back next year in New Orleans (17 and 18 October: mark your calendars!). We will find a way to add a hacker bootcamp for those wanting to get into this gig. And we're looking for ways to make something happen in Europe. If you have a bright idea about that, please get in touch. 

Why don't people use viz rooms?

Matteo Niccoli asked me why I thought the use of immersive viz rooms had declined. Certainly, most big companies were building them in about 1998 to 2002, but it's rare to see them today. My stock answer was always "Linux workstations", but of course there's more to it than that.

What exactly is a viz room?

I am not talking about 'collaboration rooms', which are really just meeting rooms with a workstation and a video conference phone, a lot of wires, and wireless mice with low batteries. These were one of the collaboration technologies that replaced viz rooms, and they seem to be ubiquitous (and also under-used).

The Viz Lab at Wisconsin–Madison. Thanks to Harold Tobin for permission.A 'viz room', for our purposes here, is a dark room with a large screen, at least 3 m wide, probably projected from behind. There's a Crestron controller with greasy fingerprints on it. There's a week-old coffee cup because not even the cleaners go in there anymore. There's probably a weird-looking 3D mouse and some clunky stereo glasses. There might be some dusty haptic equipment that would work if you still had an SGI.

Why did people stop using them?

OK, let's be honest... why didn't most people use them in the first place?

1. The rise of the inexpensive Linux workstation. The Sun UltraSPARC workstations of the late 1990s couldn't render 3D graphics quickly enough for spinning views or volume-rendered displays, so viz rooms were needed for volume interpretation and well-planning. But fast machines with up to 16GB of RAM and high-end nVidia or AMD graphics cards came along in about 2002. A full dual-headed set-up cost 'only' about $20k, compared to about 50 times that for an SGI with similar capabilities (for practical purposes). By about 2005, everyone had power and pixels on the desktop, so why bother with a viz room?
2. People never liked the active stereo glasses. They were certainly clunky and ugly, and some people complained of headaches. It took some skill to drive the software, and to avoid nauseating spinning around, so the experience was generally poor. But the real problem was that nobody cared much for the immersive experience, preferring the illusion of 3D that comes from motion. You can interactively spin a view on a fast Linux PC, and this provides just enough immersion for most purposes. (As soon as the motion stops, the illusion is lost, and this is why 3D views are so poor for print reproduction.)
3. They were expensive. Early adoption was throttled by expense  (as with most new technology). The room renovation might cost $250k, the SGI Onyx double that, and the projectors were $100k each. But  even if the capex was affordable, everyone forgot to include operating costs — all this gear was hard to maintain. The pre-DLP cathode-ray-tube projectors needed daily calibration, and even DLP bulbs cost thousands. All this came at a time when companies were letting techs go and curtailing IT functions, so lots of people had a bad experience with machines crashing, or equipment failing.
4. Intimidation and inconvenience. The rooms, and the volume interpretation workflow generally, had an aura of 'advanced'. People tended to think their project wasn't 'worth' the viz room. It didn't help that lots of companies made the rooms almost completely inaccessible, with a locked door and onerous booking system, perhaps with a gatekeeper admin deciding who got to use it.
5. Our culture of PowerPoint. Most of the 'collaboration' action these rooms saw was PowerPoint, because presenting with live data in interpretation tools is a scary prospect and takes practice.
6. Volume interpretation is hard and mostly a solitary activity. When it comes down to it, most interpreters want to interpret on their own, so you might as well be at your desk. But you can interpret on your own in a viz room too. I remember Richard Beare, then at Landmark, sitting in the viz room at Statoil, music blaring, EarthCube buzzing. I carried on this tradition when I was at Landmark as I prepared demos for people, and spent many happy hours at ConocoPhillips interpreting 3D seismic on the largest display in Canada.  

What are viz rooms good for?

Don't get me wrong. Viz rooms are awesome. I think they are indispensable for some workflows: 

• Well planning. If you haven't experienced planning wells with geoscientists, drillers, and reservoir engineers, all looking at an integrated subsurface dataset, you've been missing out. It's always worth the effort, and I'm convinced these sessions will always plan a better well than passing plans around by email. 
• Team brainstorming. Cracking open a new 3D with your colleagues, reviewing a well program, or planning the next year's research projects, are great ways to spend a day in a viz room. The broader the audience, as long as it's no more than about a dozen people, the better. 
• Presentations. Despite my dislike of PowerPoint, I admit that viz rooms are awesome for presentations. You will blow people away with a bit of live data. My top tip: make PowerPoint slides with an aspect ratio to fit the entire screen: even PowerPoint haters will enjoy 10-metre-wide slides.

What do you think? Are there still viz rooms where you work? Are there 'collaboration rooms'? Do people use them? Do you?

A fossil book

We're proud to announce the latest book from Agile Libre. Woot!

I can't take a lot of credit for this book... The idea came from 52 Things stalwart Alex Cullum, a biostratigrapher I met at Statoil in Stavanger in my first proper job. A fellow Brit, he has a profound enthusiasm for all things outside, and for writing and publishing. With able help from Allard Martinius, also a Statoil scientist and a 52 Things author from the Geology book, Alex generously undertook the task of inviting dozens of awesome palaeontologists, biostratigraphers, palynologists, and palaeobotanists from all over the world, and keeping in touch as the essays came in. Kara and I took care of the fiddly bits, and now it's all nearly done. It is super-exciting. Just check out some of the titles:

• A trace fossil primer by Dirk Knaust
• Bioastronomy by Simon Conway Morris
• Ichnology and the minor phyla by S George Pemberton
• A walk through time by Felix Gradstein
• Can you catch criminals with pollen? by Julia Webb
• Quantitative palaeontology by Ben Sloan

It's a pretty mouthwatering selection, even for someone like me who mostly thinks about seismic these days. There are another 46 like this. I can't wait to read them, and I've read them twice already.

Help a micropalaeontologist

The words in these books are a gift from the authors — 48 of them in this book! — to the community. We cherish the privilege of reading them before anyone else, and of putting them out into the world. We hope they reach far and have impact, inspiring people and starting conversations. But we want these books to give back to the community in other ways too, so from each sale we are again donating to a charity. This time it's the Educational Trust of The Micropalaeontological Society. I read about this initiative in a great piece for Geoscientist by Haydon Bailey, one of our authors: Micropalaeontology under threat!. They need our community's support and I'm excited about donating to them.

The book is in the late stages of preparation, and will appear in the flesh in about the middle of November. To make sure you get yours as soon as it's ready, you can pre-order it now.

Pre-order now from Amazon.com 
Save almost 25% off the cover price!
It's $14.58 today, but Amazon sets the final price...

Update on 2014-10-15 13:05 by Matt Hall

I just found out that it's National Fossil Day in the US today. How's that for a coincidence? Sorry, I mean, how's that for a finely tuned marketing orchestration?

You can follow the NFD action on Twitter.

The hackathon is coming

The Geophysics Hackathon is one month away! Signing up is not mandatory — you can show up on the day if you like — but it does help with the planning. It's 100% free, and I guarantee you'll enjoy yourself. You'll also learn tons about geophysics and about building software. Deets: Thrive, Denver, 8 am, 25–26 October. Bring a laptop.

Need more? Here's all the info you could ask for. Even more? Ask by email or in the comments. 

Send your project ideas

The theme this year is RESOLUTION. Participants are encouraged to post projects to hackathon.io ahead of time — especially if you want to recruit others to help. And even if you're not coming to the event, we'd love to hear your project ideas. Here are some of the proto-ideas we have so far: 

• Compute likely spatial and temporal resolution from some basic acquisition info: source, design, etc.
• Do the same but from information from the stack: trace spacing, apparent bandwidth, etc.
• Find and connect literature about seismic and log resolution using online bibliographic data.
• What does the seismic spectrum look like, given STFT limitations, or Gabor uncertainty?

If you have a bright idea, get in touch by email or in the comments. We'd love to hear from you.

Thank you to our sponsors

Three forward-thinking companies have joined us in making the hackathon as much a geophysics party as well as a scientific workshop (a real workshop). I think this industry may have trained us to take event sponsorship for granted, but it's easy to throw $5000 at the Marriott for Yet Another Coffee Break. Handing over money to a random little company in Nova Scotia to buy coffee, tacos, and cool swag for hungry geophysicists and programmers takes real guts! 

Please take a minute to check out our sponsors and reward them for supporting innovation in our community. 

Students: we are offering $250 bursaries to anyone looking for help with travel or accommodation. Just drop me a line with a project idea. If you know a student that might enjoy the event, please forwadrd this to them.

The hack is back: An invitation to get creative

We're organizing another hackathon! It's free, and it's for everyone — not just programmers. So mark your calendar for the weekend of 25 and 26 October, sign up with a friend, and come to Denver for the most creative 48 hours you'll spend this year. Then stay for the annual geophysics fest that is the SEG Annual Meeting!

First things first: what is a hackathon? Don't worry, it's not illegal, and it has nothing to do with security. It has to do with ideas and collaborative tool creation. Here's a definition from Wikipedia:

A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, or codefest) is an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software projects.

I would add that we just need a lot of scientists — you can bring your knowledge of workflows, attributes, wave theory, or rock physics. We need all of that.

Creativity in geophysics

The best thing we can do with our skills — and to acquire new ones — is create things. And if we create things with and alongside others, we learn from them and they learn from us, and we make lasting connections with people. We saw all this last year, when we built several new geophysics apps:

The event is at the THRIVE coworking space in downtown Denver, less than 20 minutes' walk from the convention centre — a Manhattan distance of under 1 mile. They are opening up especially for us — so we'll have the place to ourselves. Just us, our laptops, high-speed WiFi, and lots of tacos. 

Sign up here.It's going to be awesome.

The best in the biz

This business is blessed with some forward-looking companies that know all about innovation in subsurface geoscience. We're thrilled to have some of them as sponsors of our event, and I hope they will also be providing coders and judges for the event itself. So far we have generous support from dGB — creators of the OpendTect seismic interpretation platform — and ffA — creators the GeoTeric seismic attribute analysis toolbox. A massive Thank You to them both.

If you think your organization might be up for supporting the event, please get in touch! And remember, a fantastic way to support the event — for free! — is just to come along and take part. Sign your team up here!

Student grants

We know there's a lot going on at SEG on this same weekend, and we know it's easier to get money for traditional things like courses. So... We promise that this hackathon will bring you at least as much lasting joy, insight, and skill development as any course. And, if you'll write and tell us what you'd build, we'll consider you for one of four special grants of $250 to help cover your extra costs. No strings. Send your ideas to matt@agilegeoscience.com.

Update

on 2014-09-07 12:17 by Matt Hall

OpenGeoSolutions, the Calgary-based tech company that's carrying the FreeUSP torch and exporing the frequency domain so thoroughly, has sponsred the hackathon again this year. Thank you to Jamie and Chris and everyone else at OGS!

What I learned at Wikimania

As you may know, I like going to conferences outside the usual subsurface circuit. For this year's amusement, I spent part of last week at the annual Wikimania conference, which this year was in London, UK. I've been to Wikimania before, but this year the conference promised to be bigger and/or better than ever. And I was looking for an excuse to visit the motherland...

What is Wikimania?

Wikipedia, one of humanity's greatest achievements, has lots of moving parts:

• All the amazing content on Wikipedia.org — the best encyclopedia the world has ever seen (according to a recent study by Rodrigues and Silvério).
• The huge, diverse, distributed community of contributors and editors that writes and maintains the content.
• The free, open source software it runs on, MediaWiki, and the community of developers that built it.
• The family of sister projects: Wikimedia Commons for images, Wikidata for facts, WikiSource for references, Wiktionary for definitions, and several others.
• The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that makes all this amazing stuff happen.

Wikimania is the gathering for all of these pieces. And this year the event drew over 2000 employees of the Foundation, software contributors, editors, and consultants like me. I can't summarize it all, so here are a few highlights...

Research reviews

My favourite session, The state of WikiMedia scholarship, was hosted by Benjamin Mako Hill, Tilman Bayer, and Aaron Shaw. These guys are academics conducting research into the sociological side of wikis. They took it upon themselves to survey most of the 800 papers that appeared in the last 12 months, and to pick a few themes and highlights them for everyone. A little like the Geophysics Bright Spots column in The Leading Edge, but for the entire discipline. Very cool — definitely an idea to borrow!

A definition of community

Communities are one thing, but what sets the Wikimania community apart is its massive productivity. It has created one of the premier intellectual works in history, and done so in under 10 years, and without a leader or a Gantt chart. So it's interesting to hear about what makes this community work. What would you guess? Alignment? Collaboration? Altruism?

No, it seems to be conflict. Conflict, centered firmly on content—specifically sources, wording, accuracy, and article structure—is more prevalent in the community than collaboration (Kim Osman, WikiSym 2013). It's called it 'generative friction', and it underlines something I think is intuitively obvious: communities thrive on diversity, not homogeneity.

How to make a difference

The most striking talk, illustrating perfectly how the world today is a new and wonderful place, was by one of the most inspiring leaders I've ever seen in action: Clare Sutcliffe. In 2012, she discovered that kids weren't getting a chance to give computers instructions (other than 'post this', or 'buy that') in most UK primary schools. Instead of writing a paper about it, or setting up a research institute, or indeed blogging about it, she immediately started doing something about it. Her program, Code Club, is now running in more than 2000 schools. Today, less than 3 years after starting, Code Club is teaching teachers too, and has spread internationally. Amazing and inspiring.

Amusingly, here's a (paraphrased) comment she got from a computer science professor at the end:

I teach computer science at university, where we have to get the kids to unlearn all the stuff they think they know about programming. What are you teaching them about computer science and ethics, or is it all about making games?

Some people are beyond help.

The product is not the goal

I'll finish off with a remark by the new Executive Director of the WikiMedia Foundation, Lila Tretikov. Now that Wikipedia's quality issues are well and truly behind it — the enemy now is bias. At least 87% of edits are by men. She wondered if it might be time to change the goal of the community from 'the greatest possible article', to 'the greatest possible participation'. By definition, the greatest article is also presumably unbiased.

In other words, instead of imagining a world where everyone has free access to the sum of all human knowledge, she is asking us to imagine a world where everyone contributes to the sum of all human knowledge. If you can think of a more profound idea than this — let's hear it in the comments!

The next Wikimania will be in Mexico City, in July 2015. See you there!

Here's a thought. All this stuff is free — yay! But happy thoughts aren't enough to get stuff done. So if you value this corner of the Internet, please consider donating to the Foundation. Better still, if your company values it — maybe it uses the MediaWiki software for its own wiki — then it can help with the software's development by donating. Instead of giving Microsoft $1M for a rubbish SharePoint pseudowiki, download MediaWiki for free and donate $250k to the foundation. It's a win-win... and it's tax-deductible!

The event that connects like the web

Last week, Matt, Ben, and I attended SciPy 2014, the 13th annual scientific computing with Python conference. On a superficial level, it was just another conference. But there were other elements, brought forth by the organizers and participants (definitely not just attendees) and slowly revealed over the week. Together, the community created the conditions for a truly remarkable experience.

Immutable accessibility

By design, the experience starts before the event, and continues after it is over. Before each of the four half-day tutorials I attended, the instructors posted their teaching materials, code, and setup instructions. Most oral presentations did the same. Most code and content was served through GitHub or Bitbucket and instructions were posted using Mozilla's Etherpad. Ultimately the tools don't matter — it's the intention that is important. Instructors and speakers plan to connect.

Enhancing the being there

Beyond talks and posters, here are some examples of other events that were executed with engagement in mind:

• Keynote presentations. If a keynote is truly key, design the schedule so that everyone can show up — they're a great way to start the day on a high note.
• Birds of a Feather sessions are better than a panel discussion or Q&A. Run around with a microphone, and record notes in Etherpad.
• Lightning talks at the end the day. Anyone can request 5 minutes on a show & tell. It was the first time I've heard applause erupt in the middle of a talk — and it happened several times.
• Developer sprints take an hour to teach newbies how to become active members of your community or your project. Then spend two-days showing them how you work.

Record all the things

SciPy is not a conference, it's a hypermedia stream that connects networks across organizational boundaries. And it happens in real time — I overheard several people remarking in astonishment that the video of so-and-so's talk earlier that same morning was already posted online. My trained habit of frantic note-taking was redundant, freeing my concentration for more active listening. Instructors and presenters published their media online, and the majority of presenters pulled up interactive iPython notebooks in the browser and executed code on the fly. 

As an example of this, here's Karl Schleicher of Sergey Fomel's group at UT, talking about reproducing the results from a classic paper in The Leading Edge, Spitz (1999): 

We need this

On Friday evening Matt remarked to one of the sponsors, "This is the closest thing I have seen to what a conference should be". I think what he meant by that is that it should be about connecting. It should be about pushing our work out to the largest possible scope. It should be open by default, and designed to support ideas and conversations long after it is over. Just like all the things that the web is for as well.

Our question: Can we help SEG, AAPG, or EAGE deliver this to our community? Or do we have to go and build it?