Technical Program

Overview
Timeline
Samples of Communications
Technical Session Descriptions
Tips on How to Organize a Successful Session

• Plan on attending the section meeting which is in the springtime the year before your meeting. Or have someone from your committee attend. Promote your meeting there. Have a signup sheet available for attendees who have ideas and proposals for your meeting. Sign up field trip coordinators, too.
• Work with rest of your committee members to brainstorm on a well rounded program. You want to hit as many of the disciplines as you can and that brings in the attendance as well.
• If you find something missing from your program (like Quaternary or Planetary), solicit ideas and beat the bushes for someone who is willing to pull together a theme session, and all that goes with it.
• Solicit ideas for theme sessions partnering up with field trips.
• GSA contacts current officers of Assoc Societies, Divisions, and all of our membership to get them to be aware and involved with your meeting. If you don't hear from them, please contact them.

All abstracts must be submitted electronically through GSA. It is understood that neither the section, nor staff, will edit abstracts.

It is recommended that sections allow presentations for only those abstracts that have been submitted and accepted.

The Technical Program Chair will be responsible for creating discipline sessions, organizing discipline sessions, and assigning session chairs to the oral sessions. Conveners/Advocates for symposia and theme sessions will be responsible for organizing their own sessions.

The Technical Program Chair will work closely with GSA when organizing the program. Each section meeting will have their own abstracts database created for them. The database is created using information from the first announcement. If a theme session, or symposia session changes after the first announcement, please notify Nancy Wright at nwright@geosociety.org so the information can be corrected online.

Technical Chairs should plan on spending an hour on the phone, going through the database information with the GSA. You will be walked through the abstracts database and your duties as Technical Program Chair.

Once the program is finalized, GSA electronically notifies all authors on all the abstracts, of the action taken, i.e., whether it was accepted or rejected.

The completed technical program is posted online for public viewing.