The HUB on the South Shore

One of the things we dream about is a vibrant start-up community in the energy sector. A sort of Silicon Valley, but in the Bow Valley, or the Woodlands, or wherever. And focused on the hard, important problems in our field. More young people bringing their ideas, energy and talent — and more experienced people taking a chance, investing, and mentoring. Wresting more of the innovation opportunity back from big E&P and service companies, and freeing the professionals trapped in them.

We also want to see some of this in Nova Scotia. Indeed, the future of the Nova Scotian economy depends on it. So Agile has invested in a new community catalyst on the South Shore, the region where I live. Along with two others, I have renovated an old school room (left) and started The HUB South Shore — a place where freelancers, entrepreneurs, and professionals can come to work, network, not work, and learn. Affiliated with the HUB Halifax that Evan frequents, it's part of a global coworking movement, and a far-reaching network of HUBs.

Most importantly, it's a place to be around other highly productive, creative individuals — all of whom have made bold choices in their careers. Their proximity gives us all greater courage.  

There are similar spaces in Calgary, Houston, Aberdeen, and Perth. They completely transform the experience of working alone, or in small groups like Agile. Instead of isolation, you gain instant access to other self-starters, potential colleagues, and new friends. Many of these spaces are de facto incubators, with ready access to tools, people, and even financial backing. They are places where things happen — without IT, HR, or Legal. Imagine!

If you're thinking about starting out on your own, or with a friend or three, look around for a co-working space. It might make the transition from employee to freelancer (or even employer) a little less daunting. 

And if you find yourself on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, come to the HUB and say hello!

Creeping inefficiency

Dear CIO of a major oil and gas company,

Search—something you take for granted on the Internet—is broken in your company. Ask anyone.

You don't notice, because you don't count the cost of lost seconds or minutes finding things. And you can't count the cost of the missed opportunities because someone gave up looking. This happens thousands of times a day, by the way. 

Here's what people do when they want to find something on your intranet: 

1. Ask people if they know where it is. (Nobody does.)
2. Give up.

The good news is that there is a relatively easy way to fix this immediately and forever. Here's how:

1. Buy Google Search Appliance.

If you don't already have one of these in your server room, then your luck is in. Soon everyone will think you're a hero. At least, they will until they realize there are 31 versions of every file in your organization. At least you'll know where they all are though, right?

You're welcome,
Matt

Machines can read too

The energy industry has a lot of catching up to do. Humanity is faced with difficult, pressing problems in energy production and usage, yet our industry remains as secretive and proprietary as ever. One rich source of innovation we are seriously under-utilizing is the Internet. You have probably heard of it.

Machine experience design

Web sites are just the front-end of the web. Humans have particular needs when they read web pages — attractive design, clear navigation, etc. These needs are researched and described by the rapidly growing field of user experience design, often called UX. (Yes, the ways in which your intranet pages need fixing are well understood, just not by your IT department!)

But the web has a back-end too. Rather than being for human readers, the back-end is for machines. Just like human readers, machines—other computers—also have particular needs: structured data, and a way to make queries. Why do machines need to read the web? Because the web is full of data, and data makes the world go round. 

So website administrators need to think about machine experience design too. As well as providing beautiful web pages for humans to read, they should provide widely-accepted machine-readable format such as JSON or XML, and a way to make queries.

What can we do with the machine-readable web?

The beauty of the machine-readable web, sometimes called the semantic web, or Web 3.0, is that developers can build meta-services on it. For example, a website like hipmunk.com that finds the best flights, wherever they are. Or a service that provides charts, given some data or a function. Or a mobile app that knows where to get the oil price. 

In the machine-readable web, you could do things like:

• Write a program to analyse bibliographic data from SEG, SPE and AAPG.
• Build a mobile app to grab log mnemonics info from SLB's, HAL's, and BHI's catalogs.
• Grab course info from AAPG, PetroSkills, and Nautilus to help people find training they need.

Most wikis have a public application programming interface, giving direct, machine-friendly access to the wiki's database. Here are two views of one wiki page — click on the images to see the pages:

At SEG last year, I suggested to a course provider that they might consider offering machine access to their course catalog—so that developers can build services that use their course information and thus send them more students. They said, "Don't worry, we're building better search tools for our users." Sigh.

In this industry, everyone wants to own their own portal, and tends to be selfish about their data and their users. The problem is that you don't know who your users are, or rather who they could be. You don't know what they will want to do with your data. If you let them, they might create unimagined value for you—as hipmunk.com does for airlines with reasonable prices, good schedules, and in-flight Wi-Fi. 

I can't wait for the Internet revolution to hit this industry. I just hope I'm still alive.

The tepidity of social responsibility

Like last year, the 2012 SEG Forum was the only organized event on the morning of Day 1. And like last year, it was thinly attended. The title wasn't exactly enticing — Corporate and Academic Social Responsibility: Engagement or Estrangement — and to be honest I had no idea what we were in for. This stuff borders on sociology, and there's plenty of unfamiliar jargon. Some highlights:  

• Part of our responsibility to society is professional excellence — Isabelle Lambert
• At least one company now speaks of a 'privilege', not 'license', to operate — Isabelle Lambert
• Over-regulation is harmful, but we need them to promote disclosure and transparency — Steve Silliman
• The cheapest, easiest way to look like you care is to actually care

What they said

Mary Lou Zoback of Stanford moderated graciously throughout, despite being clearly perturbed by the thin audience. Jonathan Nyquist of Temple University was first up, and told how he is trying to get things done with $77k/year grad students using $50k grants when most donors want results not research.

Isabelle Lambert of CGGVeritas (above) eloquently described the company's principles. They actually seem to walk the walk: they were the only corporation to reply to the invitation to this forum, they seem very self-aware and open on the issue, and they have a policy of 'no political donations' — something that undermines a lot of what certain companies say about the environment, according to one questioner. 

Steve Silliman of Gonzaga University, a hydrologist, stressed the importance of the long-term view. One of his most successful projects has taken 14 years to reach its most impactful work, and has required funding from a wide range of sources — he had a terrific display of exactly when and how all this funding came in. 

Finally Michael Oxman, of Business for Social Responsibility, highlighted some interesting questions about stakeholder engagement, such as 'What constitues informed consultation?', and 'What constritutes consent?'. He was on the jargony end of things, so I got a bit lost after that.

What do you think, is social responsibility part of the culture where you work? Should it be? 

A footnote about the forum

"Social responsibility has become a popular topic these days", proclaimed the program. Not that popular, it turned out, with less than 2% of delegates showing up. Perhaps this is just the wrong venue for this particular conversation — Oxman pointed out that there is plenty of engagement in more specific venues. But maybe there's another reason for the dearth — this expert-centric, presentation-driven format felt dated somehow. Important people on stage, the unwashed, unnamed masses asking questions at the end. There was a nod to modernity: you could submit questions via Twitter or email, as well as on cards. But is this format, this approach to engagement, dead?

There's nothing to lose: let's declare it dead right now and promise ourselves that the opening morning of SEG in 2013 will be something to get our teeth into.

Your best work(space)

Doing your best work requires placing yourself in the right environment. For me, I need to be in an uncluttered space, free from major distractions, yet close enough to interactions to avoid prolonged isolation. I also believe in surrounding yourself with the energetic and inspired people, if you can afford such a luxury.

The model workspace

My wife an I are re-doing our office at home. Currently mulling over design ideas, but websites and catalogs only take me so far. I find they fall short of giving me the actual look and feel of a future space. To cope, I have built a model using SketchUp, catering to my geeky need for spatial visualization. It took me 35 minutes to build the framework using SketchUp: the walls, doors and closets and windows. Now, it's taking us much longer to design and build the workspace inside it. I was under the impression that, just as in geoscience, we need models for making detailed descisions. But perhaps, this model is complicating or delaying us getting started. Or maybe we are just being picky. Refined tastes.

This is a completely to-scale drafting of my new office. It is missing some furniture, but the main workspace is shown on the left wall; a large, expansive desk to house (up to) two monitors, two chairs, and two laptops. The wide window sill will be fitted with bench cushions for reading. Since we want a built-in look, it makes sense construct a digital model to see how the components line up with other features in the space. 

More than one place to work 

So much of what we do in geoscience is centered around effectively displaying information, so it helps to feel fresh and inspired by the environment beyond the desktop. Where we work affects how we work. Matt and I have that luxury of defining our professional spaces, and we are flexible and portable enough to work in a number of settings. I like this.

There is a second place to go to when I want to get out of the confines of my condo. I spend about 30 hours a month at a co-working space downtown. The change in scenery is invigorating. I can breathe the same air as like-minded entrepreneurs, freelancers, and sprouters of companies. I can plug into large monitors, duck into a private room for a conference call, hold a meeting, or collaborate with others. Part of what makes an office is the technology, the furniture, the lighting, which is important. The other part of a workspace is your relationship and interaction to other people and places; a sense of community.

What does your best work space look like? Are you working there now?

On being the world's smallest technical publishing company

Four months ago we launched our first book, 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics. This little book contains 52 short essays by 37 amazing geoscientists. And me and Evan. 

Since it launched, we've been having fun hearing from people who have enjoyed it:

Yesterday's mail brought me an envelope from Stavanger — Matteo Niccoli sent me a copy of 52 Things. In doing so he beat me to the punch as I've been meaning to purchase a copy for some time. It's a good thing I didn't buy one — I'd like to buy a dozen. [a Calgary geoscientist]

A really valuable collection of advice from the elite in Geophysics to help you on your way to becoming a better more competent Geophysicist. [a review on Amazon.co.uk]

We are interested in ordering 50 to 100 copies of the book 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics [from an E&P company. They later ordered 100.]

The economics

We thought some people might be interested in the economics of self-publishing. If you want to know more, please ask in the comments — we're happy to share our experiences. 

We didn't approach a publisher with our book. We knew we wanted to bootstrap and learn — the Agile way. Before going with Amazon's CreateSpace platform, we considered Lightning Source (another print-on-demand provider), and an ordinary 'web press' printer in China. The advantages of CreateSpace are Amazon's obvious global reach, and not having to carry any inventory. The advantages of a web press are the low printing cost per book and the range of options — recycled paper, matte finish, gatefold cover, and so on.

So, what does a book cost?

• You could publish a book this way for $0. But, unless you're an editor and designer, you might be a bit disappointed with your results. We spent about $4000 making the book: interior design about $2000, cover design was about $650, indexing about $450. We lease the publishing software (Adobe InDesign) for about $35 per month.
• Each book costs $2.43 to manufacture. Books are printed just in time — Amazon's machines must be truly amazing. I'd love to see them in action. 
• The cover price is $19 at Amazon.com, about €15 at Amazon's European stores, and £12 at Amazon.co.uk. Amazon are free to offer whatever discounts they like, at their expense (currently 10% at Amazon.com). And of course you can get free shipping. Amazon charges a 40% fee, so after we pay for the manufacturing, we're left with about $8 per book. 
• We also sell through our own estore, at $19. This is just a slightly customizable Amazon page. This channel is good for us because Amazon only charges 20% of the sale price as their fee. So we make about $12 per book this way. We can give discounts here too — for large orders, and for the authors.
• Amazon also sells the book through a so-called expanded distribution channel, which puts the book on other websites and even into bookstores (highly unlikely in our case). Unfortunately, it doesn't give us access to universities and libraries. Amazon's take is 60% through this channel.
• We sell a Kindle edition for $9. This is a bargain, by the way—making an attractive and functional ebook was not easy. The images and equations look terrible, ebook typography is poor, and it just feels less like a book, so we felt $9 was about right. The physical book is much nicer. Kindle royalties are complicated, but we make about $5 per sale. 

By the numbers

It doesn't pay to fixate on metrics—most of the things we care about are impossible to measure. But we're quantitative people, and numbers are hard to resist. To recoup our costs, not counting the time we lovingly invested, we need to sell 632 books. (Coincidentally, this is about how many people visit agilegeoscience.com every week.) As of right now, there are 476 books out there 'in the wild', 271 of which were sold for actual money. That's a good audience of people — picture them, sitting there, reading about geophysics, just for the love of it.

The bottom line

My wife Kara is an experienced non-fiction publisher. She's worked all over the world in editorial and production. So we knew what we were getting into, more or less. The print-on-demand stuff was new to her, and the retail side of things. We already knew we suck at marketing. But the point is, we knew we weren't in this for the money, and it's about relevant and interesting books, not marketing.

And now we know what we're doing. Sorta. We're in the process of collecting 52 Things about geology, and are planning others. So we're in this for one or two more whatever happens, and we hope we get to do many more.

We can't say this often enough: Thank You to our wonderful authors. And Thank You to everyone who has put down some hard-earned cash for a copy. You are awesome. 

First class in India

I wrote this post yesterday morning, sitting in the Indira Ghandi International Airport in Delhi, India.

Where am I?

I'm in India. Some quick facts:

• Population: 1.2 billion, or 36 times Canada's
• There over 1.4 million sci/tech/engrg/math graduates every year
• In the US, there are about 420 000 such graduates
• The prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology receive dozens of applicants per place
• In contrast, the University of Oxford gets 5
• Because of this, the required mark in many subjects is 100%

I met some of these recent graduates last week, in an experimental corporate training course. Cairn India has been running a presentation skills course for several years, provided by a local trainer called Yadhav Mehra. Yadhav is a demure, soft-spoken man, right up until he stands up in front of his students. Then he becomes a versatile actor and spontaneous stand-up, swerving with the confidence of a Delhi cab driver between poignant personal stories and hilarious what-not-to-do impressions. I’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of courses before, but Yadhav really made me see ‘training’ as a profession in itself, with skills and standards of its own. I am grateful for that.

How did I end up here?

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Last fall, Susan Eaton—whom I’d met in the pub after teaching for the first time—wrote a nice piece about my then-new writing course. One of my long-lost PhD supervisors, Stuart Burley, read this article in his office at Cairn India in Delhi, and it triggered a thought. He had Yadhav, a pro trainer, helping his super-bright geoscience and engineering grads with their presentation skills, but they also needed coaching in writing. 

Their education provides them with...

the traditional written communication vernacular employed in the physical sciences, in which exposition is lengthily embellished with extraneous verbiage, and the passivum, or passive voice in its not uncommon appellation, is unfailingly and rigorously exercised.

You get my point. Stuart’s thought was: let’s do combine the two courses!

What happened?

The great thing about Stuart is that, along with breadth of experience and penetrating geological insight, he’s practical—he gets stuff done. (Like almost everything else in my dim-witted student days, I didn’t appreciate how valuable this was at the time.) So the three of us planned a 3-day course that combined my day's worth of writing coaching with Yadhav's two-day presentation course. Yadhav brought some didactic rigour, and I brought some technical depth. Like all collectable first edition, it had some rough edges, but it went beautifully. Students wrote an extended abstract for a conference paper on Tuesday, then presented their paper on Thursday—they made a great effort, and all did brilliantly.

I hope we run the course again—I'd love to see it reach its full potential. 

In the meantime, if you're interested in exploring ways to get more people in your organization writing a little better, or a little more often, do get in touch! You can find out more here. 

Open up

After a short trip to Houston, today I am heading to London, Ontario, for a visit with Professor Burns Cheadle at the University of Western Ontario. I’m stoked about the trip. On Saturday I’m running my still-developing course on writing for geoscientists, and tomorrow I’m giving the latest iteration of my talk on openness in geoscience. I’ll post a version of it here once I get some notes into the slides. What follows is based on the abstract I gave Burns.

A recent survey by APEGBC's Innovation magazine revealed that geoscience is not among the most highly respected professions. Only 20% of people surveyed had a ‘great deal of respect’ for geologists and geophysicists, compared to 30% for engineers, and 40% for teachers. This is far from a crisis, but as our profession struggles to meet energy demands, predict natural disasters, and understand environmental change, we must ask, How can we earn more trust? Perhaps more openness can help. I’m pretty sure it can’t hurt.

Many people first hear about ‘open’ in connection with software, but open software is just one point on the open compass. And even though open software is free, and can spread very easily in principle, awareness is a problem—open source marketing budgets are usually small. Open source widgets are great, but far more powerful are platforms and frameworks, because these allow geoscientists to focus on science, not software, and collaborate. Emerging open frameworks include OpendTect and GeoCraft for seismic interpretation, and SeaSeis and BotoSeis for seismic processing.

If open software is important for real science, then open data are equally vital because they promote reproducibility. Compared to the life sciences, where datasets like the Human Genome Project and Visible Human abound, the geosciences lag. In some cases, the pieces exist already in components like government well data, the Open Seismic Repository, and SEG’s list of open datasets, but they are not integrated or easy to find. In other cases, the data exist but are obscure and lack a simple portal. Some important plays, of global political and social as well as scientific interest, have little or no representation: industry should release integrated datasets from the Athabasca oil sands and a major shale gas play as soon as possible.

Open workflows are another point, because they allow us to accelerate learning, iteration, and failure, and thus advance more quickly. We can share easily but slowly and inefficiently by publishing, or attending meetings, but we can also write blogs, contribute to wikis, tweet, and exploit the power of the internet as a dynamic, multi-dimensional network, not just another publishing and consumption medium. Online readers respond, get engaged, and become creators, completing the feedback loop. The irony is that, in most organizations, it’s easier to share with the general public, and thus competitors, than it is to share with colleagues.

The fourth point of the compass is in our attitude. An open mindset recognizes our true competitive strengths, which typically are not our software, our data, or our workflows. Inevitably there are things we cannot share, but there’s far more that we can. Industry has already started with low-risk topics for which sharing may be to our common advantage—for example safety, or the environment. The question is, can we broaden the scope, especially to the subsurface, and make openness the default, always asking, is there any reason why I shouldn’t share this?

In learning to embrace openness, it’s important to avoid some common misconceptions. For example, open does not necessarily mean free-as-in-beer. It does not require relinquishing ownership or rights, and it is certainly not the same as public domain. We must also educate ourselves so that we understand the consequences of subtle and innocuous-seeming clauses in licences, for example those pertaining to non-commerciality. If we can be as adept in this new language as many of us are today in intellectual property law, say, then I believe we can accelerate innovation in energy and build trust among our public stakeholders.

So what are you waiting for? Open up!

Stop waiting for permission to knock someone's socks off

When I had a normal job, this was the time of year when we set our goals for the coming months. Actually, we sometimes didn't do it till March. Then we'd have the end-of-year review in October... Anyway, when I thought of this, it made me think about my own goals for the year, for Agile, and my career (if you can call it that). Here's my list:

1. Knock someone's socks off.

That's it. That's my goal. I know it's completely stupid. It's not SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, or timely. I don't believe in SMART. For a start, it's obviously a backronym. That's why there's attainable and realistic in there—what's the difference? They're equally depressing and uninspiring. Measurable, attainable goals are easy, and I'm going to do them anyway: it's called work. It's the corporate equivalent of saying my goals for the day are waking up, getting out of bed, having a shower, making a list of attainable goals... Maybe those are goals if you're in rehab, but if you're a person with a job or a family they're just part of being a person.

I don't mean we should not make plans and share lists of tasks to help get stuff done. It's important to have everyone working at least occasionally in concert. In my experience people tend to do this anyway, but there's no harm in writing them down for everyone to see. Managers can handle this, and everyone should read them.

Why do these goals seem so dry? You love geoscience or engineering or whatever you do. That's a given. (If you don't, for goodness's sake save yourself.) But people keep making you do boring stuff that you don't like or aren't much good at and there's no time left for the awesomeness you are ready to unleash, if only there was more time, if someone would just ask. 

Stop thinking like this. 

You are not paid to be at work, or really to do your job. Your line manager might think this way, because that's how hierarchical management works: it's essentially a system of passing goals and responsiblities down to the workforce. A nameless, interchangeable workforce. But what the executives and shareholders of your company really want from you, what they really pay you for, is Something Amazing. They don't know what it is, or what you're capable of — that's your job. Your job is to systematically hunt and break and try and build until you find the golden insight, the new play, the better way. The real challenge is how you fit the boring stuff alongside this, not the other way around.

Knock someone's socks off, then knock them back on again with these seismic beauties.Few managers will ever come to you and say, "If you think there's something around here you can transform into the most awesome thing I've ever seen, go ahead and spend some time on it." You will never get permission to take risks, commit to something daring, and enjoy yourself. But secretly, everyone around you is dying to have their socks knocked right off. Every day they sadly go home with their socks firmly on: nothing awesome today.

I guarantee that, in the process of trying to do something no-one has ever done or thought of before, you will still get the boring bits of your job done. The irony is that no-one will notice, because they're blinded by the awesome thing no-one asked you for. And their socks have been knocked off.

The blog post

People sometimes eye Evan and I with suspicion when they ask about what we do. Even after a whole year of Agile, I admit I am sometimes at a loss for a snappy answer. In a nutshell, I'd say:

We solve geoscience problems for geoscientists. We like fast and useful solutions, not perfect or expensive solutions—we don't believe in perfect or expensive solutions. We love the things you might not have time for: data, technology, and documentation.

Above all, we love to help people. And that's what the blog is for: we want to be useful, mostly relevant, perhaps interesting, occasionally insightful. And we live on the edge of the continent and don't want to fall off, small and forgotten, into the North Atlantic. For us, the blog is a portal to Houston, Calgary, Aberdeen, Perth, and the rest of our world.

Is it worth it? Well, that depends how you measure 'worth it'. I reckon we spend 8 to 16 hours on an average of 3 weekly posts to the blog, so it's a substantial investment for us. A lot of it ends up in the wiki, or in a paper, or elsewhere; it's definitely a good catalyst for thinking, making useful stuff, and starting conversations. I don't think the blog has generated business purely on its own yet, but it has helped keep our profile up, and made us easier to find. 

Who reads it? We don't know for sure, but we have some clues. Our website has been visited almost exactly 30 000 times this year. We currently get about 800 visits a week, from about 550 unique visitors (shown in the chart above). Of those, about 30% are in the US, 20% are in Canada, 9% in the UK, then it's Australia, Germany, India, and Norway. The list contains 136 countries. This last fact alone fills us with joy, even if it's wrong by a factor of two.

How do the readers find us? About 140 people subscribe to our feed by email, which means they get an email alert the morning after we publish a post. Each week, only about 20 people come to us via Google, with search terms like seismic rock physics, agile geophysics, and tight gas vs shale gas. Since we announce new posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (and now Google+ too), we get visitors from those sources too: they send about 24%, 18%, and 6% of our traffic respectively (G+ has too little data). The average visitor looks at 2.2 pages and stays for 3 mins and 2 seconds. But hey, 3 minutes is a long time on the Internet. Right?

If you were looking for some juicy geoscience, not this navel gazing, then check out our recent Greatest Hits, and have an amazing New Year! See you in 2012.

Blog traffic data are summarized from Google Analytics and are for interest only—the data are prone to all sorts of errors and artifacts. What's more, I do not have data for the first 6 weeks or so of traffic. Pinches of salt all round.