Your next employment contract

You own your brain. The hackathon we're hosting has reminded me of this. 

More than one person has expressed difficulty with reconciling their wish to participate in the event with their employment contract, which probably says something like this:

Everything you do belongs to us.

Your family photos belong to you

Yesterday I read something about US government intellectual property. I knew that most government content is free of copyright, and what I read confirmed it. It's a sort of mirror image of the situation we have in industry (this is from ACQuipedia): 

Works created by Federal employees in the course of their official duties are automatically in the public domain and may not be copyrighted by anyone.

Interestingly, works not created in the course of their duties are their copyright as normal. So a soldier's photographs on her cellphone are her intellectual property, even if they were taken on duty (provided she's not a photographer).

Our community should stand up for something resembling this same rule in the corporate environment. Of course works created in the course of your duties as an employed geoscientist or engineer belong to your employer. But clearly your family vacation photographs do not. And just as clearly, your edits to Wikipedia articles do not (unless that's your job, you lucky thing). And neither, with certain provisos, do your contributions to a hackathon.

What provisos? Well, there are other, equally important clauses about confidentiality in your contract. You may not legally disclose the company's proprietary intellectual property. So you can't show up at a hackathon and code up your company's latest migration algorithm. But coding up a new, previously unknown algorithm would be ethically OK, but if you're a geophysical programmer I can see the potential conflict there — it's a judgment call. I hope your company trusts you to make a fair decision. If the algorithm turns out to be awesome, and had 3 collaborators from different companies, then I say they should all be glad you got together to invent it. Innovation is not a zero-sum game.

Shop rights

It turns out that there's a common law provision for the ownership of your brain. So-called shop rights are generally upheld by courts, at least in the US. According to an excellent guide to IP from the IEEE, they go like this (there are variants):

1. confidential information and inventions or other creations made during the course of employment as a normal part of job duties belong to the employer
2. inventions made by the employee off the job, using the employee's own time and materials, will generally belong to the employee (absent fraud, related inplant work of which the employee might be aware, or other special circumstances); and
3. inventions not related to work duties, but created with some nontrivial use of the employer's time, funds or materials still belong to the employee, but the employer has limited rights to exploit the invention without payment of royalties or other compensation.

Awesome! This is perfectly sensible. Unfortunately, employers can write almost anything they like in their contracts, and it sounds to me like clauses that trample on these rights are fairly common. And they will continue to be common until people start refusing to sign contracts that contain them.

Demand change

In light of all this, here are 3 things to demand (yes, demand — you do actually have some bargaining power when someone tries to hire you) in your next employment contract:

• At the very least, clauses limiting your shop rights should be removed. In their absence, conflicts will be resolved by the application of common law.
• You may contribute to Wikipedia, SEG Wiki, PetroWiki, SubSurfWiki, and other open content projects.
• You may contribute to OpendTect, Madagascar, and other open source software projects.
• You may contribute to unstructured events, including but not limited to unconferences, hackathons, and idea jams. 

Bottom line: your employer owns some of your creations, specifically the ones you make for them, at work, with their data, their tools, their employees, and their ideas. But you own the rest, and you emphatically own your creativity.

Changing how we are employed is entirely up to us. Legal professionals will pin us down to the bare minimum of openness and freedom otherwise — it's their job. So push back, ask for change, and retain your brain.

Expert culture is bad for you

Expert culture is bad for you. Not experts themselves, though I prefer not to use the word at all, but a culture that elevates them unduly. I don't like the word because it is usually used to mean something like master, chief, authority, or worst of all, judge. 

What's wrong with expert culture? Lots:

• It disenfranchises everyone else. Non-experts think there are some opinions they are not entitled to. In a highly creative, subjective discipline like ours, this is A Bad Thing.
• This forces them to wait around till the expert can tell them what to do. Which slows everything down. If they have to wait too long, or can't get the expert's attention, or the expert can't or won't get involved, the opportunity, whatever it was, may disappear. 
• Meanwhile, experts are burdened with impossibly high expectations — of always being right or at least deeply insightful. This makes them cautious. So if they're uncertain or uncomfortable, they hang back because there's no upside to being wrong in the expert culture.
• Expert culture encourages knowledge hoarding, because it explicitly connects personal knowledge with glory, and downplays what the rest of the organization knows. The ignorance of the masses highlights the expert's prestige.
• Experts, frustrated with having to tell people what to do all the time, write best practice documents and other edicts, which try to make tricky workflows idiot-proof. But idiot-proof means idiot-friendly — who did you hire?

How to fix it

Better is a culture of expertise. The basic premise is that expertise is everywhere in your organization. You do not, and can not, know where it is. Indeed, its whereabouts will often surprise you. Turns out you hired awesome people after all — and they know stuff. Yay!

In the culture of expertise, what are these people we often call experts? They are still highly experienced people, with unusually broad or deep careers, with profound intelligence or intuition. But now they are free to apply their insight and judgment in more creative and more daring ways — even to things they aren't considered experts in. And their role in this new culture shifts slightly: it becomes the seeking, assessing, parsing, synthesizing, and spreading of expertise in the organization — wherever it is. They become curators, mentors, and champions of excellence. And they will revel in it.

The best experts do this already. How many do you know? Will you step up?

Dream geoscience courses

MOOCs mean it's never been easier to learn something new.This is an appeal for opinions. Please share your experiences and points of view in the comments.

Are you planning to take any technical courses this year? Are you satisfied with the range of courses offered by your company, or the technical societies, or the commercial training houses (PetroSkills, Nautilus, and so on)? And how do you choose which ones to take — do you just pick what you fancy, seek recommendations, or simply aim for field classes at low latitudes?

At the end of 2012, several geobloggers wrote about courses they'd like to take. Some of them sounded excellent to me too... which of these would you take a week off work for?

• Programming in geology — Shawn Wright of Vi-Carius
• Working the government/academia/industry system — Shawn Wright
• Art for geologists — proposed by Callan Bentley at Mountain Beltway
• The roots of geological thinking — both Callan Bentley and Shawn Wright
• Offshore geologic site assessment — Dianna Phu at Eat. Sleep. Geology.
• Geoscience 999: a short, sharp shock — Pete Rowley at Lithics
• Ballparking — Pete Rowley
• Field methods theory — Penny Higgins at Paleopix
• Investing in economic deposits — Ann at Ann's Musings
• Geology, history, and legend — Hollis at In the Company of Plants & Rocks
• Earth systems & society — Lockwood Dewitt at Outside the Interzone

Here's my own list, complete with instructors. It includes some of the same themes...

• Programming for geoscientists (learn to program!) — Eric Jones
• Solving hard problems about the earth — hm, that's a tough one... Bill Goodway?
• Communicating rocks online — Brian Romans or Maitri Erwin
• Data-driven graphics in geoscience — the figure editor at Nature Geoscience
• Mathematics clinic for geoscientists — Brian Russell
• Becoming a GIS ninja — er, a GIS ninja
• Working for yourself — needs multiple points of view

What do you think? What's your dream course? Who would teach it?

You own your brain

I met someone last week who said her employer — a large integrated oil & gas company — 'owned her'. She said she'd signed an employment agreement that unequivocally spelt this out. This person was certainly a professional on paper, with a graduate degree and plenty of experience. But the company had, perhaps unwittingly, robbed her of her professional independence and self-determination. What a thing to lose.

Agreements like this erode our profession. Do not sign agreements like this. 

The idea that a corporation can own a person is obviously ludicrous — I'm certain she didn't mean it literally. But I think lots of people feel confined by their employment. For some reason, it's acceptable to gossip and whisper over coffee, but talking in any public way about our work is uncomfortable for some people. This needs to change.

Your employer owns your products. They pay you for concerted effort on things they need, and to have their socks knocked off occasionally. But they don't own your creativity, judgment, insight, and ideas — the things that make you a professional. They own their data, and their tools, and their processes, but they don't own the people or the intellects that created them. And they can't — or shouldn't be able to — stop you from going out into the world and being an active, engaged professional, free to exerise and discuss our science with whomever you like.

If you're asked to sign something saying you can't talk at meetings, write about your work, or contribute to open projects like SEGwiki — stop.

These contracts only exist because people sign them. Just say, 'No. I am a professional. I own my brain.'

Ways to experiment with conferences

Yesterday I wrote about why I think technical conferences underdeliver. Coincidentally, Evan sent me this quote from Seth Godin's blog yesterday:

We've all been offered access to so many tools, so many valuable connections, so many committed people. What an opportunity.

What should we do about it? 

If we are collectively spending 6 careers at the SEG Annual Meeting every autumn, as I asserted yesterday, let's put some of that cognitive surplus to work!

I suggest starting to experiment with our conferences. There are so many tools: unconferences, idea jams, hackdays, wikithons, and other participative activities. Anything to break up sitting in the dark watching 16 lectures a day, slamming coffee and cramming posters in between. Anything to get people not just talking and drinking, but working together. What a way to build collaborations, friendships, and trust. Connecting with humans, not business cards. 

Unconvinced? consider which of these groups of people looks like they're learning, being productive, and having fun:

This year I've been to some random (for me) conferences — Science Online, Wikimania, and Strata. Here are some engaging, fun, and inspiring things happening in meetings of those communities:

• Speaker 'office hours' during the breaks so you can find them and ask questions. 
• Self-selected topical discussion tables at lunch. 
• Actual time for actual discussion after talks (no, really!).
• Cool giveaways: tattoos and stickers, funky notebooks, useful mobile apps, books, scientific toys.
• A chance to sit down and work with others — hackathons, co-writing, idea jams, and so on. 
• Engaged, relevant, grounded social media presence, not more marketing.
• An art gallery, including graphics captured during sessions. 
• No posters! Those things epitomize the churn of one-way communication.

Come to our experiment!

Clearly there's no shortage of things to try. Converting a session here, a workshop there — it's easy to do something in a sandbox, alongside the traditional. And by 'easy', I mean uncertain, risky and uncomfortable. It will require a new kind of openness. I'm not certain of the outcome, but I am certain that it's worth doing. 

On this note, a wonderful thing happened to us recently. We were — and still are — planning an unconference of our own (stay tuned for that). Then, quite unprovoked, Carmen Dumitrescu asked Evan if we'd like to chair a session at the Canada GeoConvention in May. And she invited us to 'do something different'. Perfect timing!

So — mark your calendar! GeoConvention, Calgary, May 2013. Something different.

The photo of the lecture, from the depressing point of view of the speaker, is licensed CC-BY-SA by Flickr user Pierre-Alain Dorange. The one of the unconference is licensed CC-BY-SA-NC by Flickr user aforgrave.

Are conferences failing you too?

I recently asked a big software company executive if big exhibitions are good marketing value. The reply:

It's not a waste of money. It's a colossal waste of money.

So that's a 'no'.

Is there a problem here?

Next week I'll be at the biggest exhibition (and conference) in our sector: the SEG Annual Meeting. Thousands of others will be there, but far more won’t. Clearly it’s not indispensable or unmissable. Indeed, it’s patently missable — I did just fine in my career as a geophysicist without ever going. Last year was my first time.

Is this just the nature of mass market conferences? Is the traditional academic format necessarily unremarkable? Do the technical societies try too hard to be all things to all people, and thereby miss the mark for everyone? 

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, I can only speak for myself. I'm getting tired of conferences. Perhaps I've reached some new loop in the meandering of my career, or perhaps I'm just grumpy. But as I've started to whine, I'm finding more and more allies in my conviction that conferences aren't awesome.

What are conferences for?

• They make lots of money for the technical societies that organize them.
• A good way to do this is to provide marketing and sales opportunities for the exhibiting vendors.
• A good way to do this is to attract lots of scientists there, baiting with talks by all the awesomest ones.
• A good way to do this, apparently, is to hold it in Las Vegas.

But I don't think the conference format is great at any of these things, except possibly the first one. The vendors get prospects (that's what sales folk call people) that are only interested in toys and beer — they might be users, but they aren't really customers. The talks are samey and mostly not memorable (and you can only see 5% of them). Even the socializing is limited by the fact that the conference is gigantic and run on a tight schedule. And don't get me started on Las Vegas. 

If we're going to take the trouble of flying 8000 people to Las Vegas, we had better have something remarkable to show for it. Do we? What do we get from this giant conference? By my conservative back-of-the-envelope calculation, we will burn through about 210 person-years of productivity in Las Vegas next week. That's about 6 careers' worth. Six! Are we as a community satisfied that we will produce 6 careers' worth of insight, creativity, and benefit?

You can probably tell that I am not convinced. Tomorrow, I will put away the wrecking ball of bellyaching, and offer some constructive ideas, and a promise. Meanwhile, if you have been to an amazing conference, or can describe one from your imagination, or think I'm just being a grouch — please use the comments below.

Map data ©2012 Google, INEGI, MapLink, Tele Atlas. 

Update on 2012-11-01 13:37 by Matt Hall

Don't miss the next post, Ways to experiment with conferences.

The intentional professional

I'm involved in a local effort to launch a coworking and business incubation space in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, where I live. Like most things worth doing, it's taking some time, but I think we'll get there eventually. Along this journey, I heard a lovely phrase recently — intentional community. What a great way to describe a group of coworkers and entrepreneurs, implying a group formed not just on purpose, but also with purpose. 

But it made me think too — it made me wonder if some of the communities I'm involved in might be unintentional — accidental, inadvertent, perhaps even a mistake? Would you describe your workplace as intentional? If you're a student, are your classes intentional? That committee you're on — is that intentional?

Another phrase that keeps popping into my head lately is

Don't be a looky-loo. — Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Even if you don't know what a looky-loo is, you'll recognize the behaviour immediately. A looky-loo is someone who, taking Woody Allen's advice a little too seriously, thinks 80% of success is showing up. If you've ever organized a meeting, with an idea that you might get something done in it, you know the sort: they arrive, they eat the cookies, they do the small talk, then they sit there and stare at you for an hour, then they leave. No input given. No notes taken. No point being there. 

Next time you hear yourself described in passive terms — attendee, reader, employee, student, user, consumer, react to it. You're being described as a person that things happen to. A victim.

Instead of being an unintentional victim, think of yourself an essential part of whatever it is. You are a participant, a partner, a stakeholder, a contributor, a collaborator. If you're not an essential part of it then, for everyone's sake, don't go.

This is what professionalism is.