Convening a session in the Tectonics and Structural Geology Division

Thank you for your willingness to convene a session in the TS division! We build our programme on the basis of sessions suggested by the community and your input is therefore crucial to a solid and exciting programme. We here give information to help you in the convening process.

The TS programme committee (PC) aims at a well-balanced programme at the EGU General Assembly, covering a wide selection of structural geology and tectonics topics. We coordinate our programme closely with other EGU divisions (e.g., GD, GM, SM, GMPV, EMRP) to avoid overlap in content and scheduling clashes. The TS PC is happy to help and advise at all stages, so please do not hesitate to contact us. We can be found here.

The deadlines below are only provided approximately as they change every year.

Please have a close look at the EGU convener guidelines, which can be found here. We focus below on information that is additional to these EGU guidelines.

The workflow for initiating your own session is as follows:

Skeleton programme (Early Summer)

The PC builds a skeleton programme. This lists subprogramme headers and may contain a limited number of session proposals solicited by the TS PC.

Public call-for-sessions (Summer)

Any EGU member (you!) can propose a session. Before submitting a session idea, please carefully check the website if a similar session may already have been suggested. The PC will usually prefer the first proposal of very similar sessions.

TS sessions have in general 3 conveners and we strongly encourage diversity in geography, age, and gender. Please check with all conveners that they agree to being convener. A session has one main convener (called 'convener'), who coordinates communication among the session conveners and with the TS PC. The others are called 'co-conveners'. TS recommends that the main convener is on for maximum two years, then becomes co-convener, and then rotates off.

Please provide a short description of the aims of the session. You can ask for co-organisation with other divisions (see further down for an explanation) by adding a request in the comment box. Keep in mind that at this stage a session is not accepted yet for the programme and we advise to wait with soliciting abstracts.

Session programme (September/October)

The PC builds the session programme out of the proposed sessions. In case of evident overlap, the TS PC will ask conveners to merge sessions or modify the focus. Please note that in the TS division, sessions and conveners are not continued automatically from one year to the next. Conveners will be notified of acceptance of their session for the TS programme.

Call-for-abstracts (Autumn)

This is the time to advertise your session! It may help to invite a limited number of solicited presentations. Note that an oral cannot be guaranteed as this will depend on the number of abstracts that a session receives. As a guideline, we suggest to invite one (1) solicited abstract per session. If experience from previous years gives confidence for more than one oral block, our guideline is 1 solicited abstract per oral block. Please avoid soliciting the same person in consecutive years. Solicited abstracts have status 'solicited' in the programme, but are else treated as all other abstracts. This means that there is no abstract fee waiver. In addition, solicited talks are 15 min in TS.

Support application ranking (November/December)

Information on the EGU support programme can be found here. The abstract deadline for authors, who wish to apply for support is around late November.

Your are then asked to rank and comment on the support applications that were received in your session.

Abstract deadline (January)

Make sure you receive all abstracts that you may expect from colleagues in time and advertise your session again in the last few weeks/days.

Depending on the amount of abstracts your session received, it will be accepted with oral blocks, accepted as poster-only session, or your are asked to merge with another session and transfer the submitted abstracts to this merged session.

The workflow up to the EGU General Assembly is as follows:

Information about session merges

Sessions that have not received enough abstracts for an oral block may be asked to merge. Alternatively, a session can be poster-only, but keep in mind that a good poster session will also require at least 10 posters.

The procedure with session merges is as follows: Once all conveners have agreed on a merge, decide which session will become the host session (usually the session with most abstract numbers). The other sessions transfer their abstracts to the host session. The host session has to accept the incoming abstracts. After this, the convener of the host session can adjust session title, session description, and co-convener list to reflect the merge.

Session organisation phase SOI - Abstract implementation

In SOI, you are asked to review all abstracts in your session and accept, reject, or transfer them.

In case your session did not receive enough abstracts and has been asked to merge with another session, you have to transfer all the abstracts to the corresponding session. You may become a co-convener in the merged session.

Session organisation phase SOII - Session tagging

Provide scheduling information, such as expected audience size, and back-to-back and no-overlap requests with other sessions.

Keep in mind that the PC will do its best to meet requests, but that this is not always possible due to the puzzle of building a programme that has 2-3 TS sessions in parallel and where topical overlaps with neighbouring divisions should be avoided.

Oral block assignment

The EGU PC will allocate oral blocks to TS based on the total number of abstracts that we received. The TS PC then allocates oral blocks to sessions based on both the total number of abstracts and the number of abstracts with an oral request for that session, weighed equally.

Session organisation phase SOIII - Presentation selection

• Select 2 chairs per oral block and per poster block. Chairs do not necessarily have to be conveners.
• Schedule 2 young scientist speakers per oral time block (so 2 out of 6).
• Check with all participants that they will come.
• Consider defining sub-topics for your oral and poster blocks.
• Highlight invited talks and invited posters by selecting them as 'solicited'. Solicited speakers have the same length talk as other speakers.
• Please note that authors (first and co-authors) should not have a solicited oral presentation in session(s) they convene.
• Conveners should not be oral presenters in the session(s) they convene.
• Place oral contributions in order. The scheduling tool assumes chronological order for the orals, so the first 6 will be placed in the first oral block etc.
• Place poster contributions in order.

Information about co-organisation and sponsoring

TS sessions may be co-organised with other EGU divisions. Please enter your suggestions in the comment box when uploading your session proposal.

Co-organisation means that a session becomes part of the programme of all co-organising divisions and that a session will get a session number of each division. For example, sessions could be TSx.x/NHx.x/SMx.x (co-sponsoring divisions are always listed alphabetically after the first organiser) or GDx.x/TSx.x etc.

EGU encourages session co-sponsoring with colleague organisations. An agreement to this purpose is for example in place with the American Geophysical Union. Division presidents decide on co-sponsoring of a session and suggestions for co-sponsoring should therefore be directed to the Division President. In general, co-sponsoring is a virtual action, without implying funding and should be reciprocal, involving co-sponsoring of sessions at both annual meetings of the partners.