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We're holding this unsession because we want to see a couple of things happen. One is to
get people together in a new way, and the other is actually to do some work and get
this list of big, unsolved problems in subsurface geoscience.
We have to solve a problem, or some problems, and it's the people in this room, and let's
say we've got ten years, and there's really no constraints, all right, so we can tackle
to solve? Maybe some of them are easy and we can have a go at them right away, and have
them solved by the end of next week. Maybe some of them are really hard and it's going
to take until Christmas 2027 to even scratch the surface.
The normal conference session is very one way. There's one person at the front, and
the room is darkened, and there's usually not much time for discussion. So we've gone
really to the other extreme, where it's all discussion, all the way, the room is never
dark, there's very little one-way communication. We want to try to capture what they're talking
about, and illustrate that and make it graphical and tangible and something that we can kind
of manifest. So there'll be a lot of drawing, there'll be a lot of writing, there'll be
a lot of notes, there'll be a lot of paper going around, and a lot of buzz.
Behind the ideas are all these dimensions like, how useful is this? How widespread is
this? How much is this worth? And, so, we felt like if we can expose some of those dimensions,
expose some of those axes and let people be a scientist, essentially, and be analytic
about ideas, we felt like that was something that they would (a) recognize and (b) have
fun doing. This is great because first you get to meet
a lot of new and interesting people, or reconnect with people. And this is definitely a two-way
conversation, instead of a one-way conversation. This was collaborative. It was everyone sitting
and working together, instead of one person up at the front, talking to the room and not
necessarily integrating with the people in the room.
Lots of discussion, it's sort of the antithesis of a normal session.
I love the idea that people can walk out of this session and feel like they've contributed,
participated, that there's a trail of pieces of paper with their handwriting on it that
will be on the web and be scrutinized by people in Australia thinking about similar sorts
of technical problems. Yeah, huge amount of content came out of today.
We'll get all of that online and invite people to get involved, comment on what's there,
get in touch if they want to take things further, and we'll find new ways to explore this stuff.