Format

Each conference's attendance will be limited to $\sim$75 people including $\sim$10 keynote lecturers who are responsible for the tutorials. We will strive to make the meeting itself and the design of the program and instructional material as accessible and transparent as possible to reach and invite the broadest cross-section of the community. Each meeting topic and a preliminary schedule will be announced about nine months in advance in EOS: Transactions of the AGU, on all suited emailing lists (such as those of MSA ³, SEDI⁴, or SCEC ⁵), and our web site, which we hope will in time become a frequently used resource in its own right. For the first meeting, we will also email Earth Science departments in the US and Europe directly such that the respective administrations can forward our announcement to students and faculty and post our fliers.

All potential participants but the instructors will have to apply to take part in the conference and send in a short ($\sim$50 words) description of their current research interests and state the reasons why they want to attend the meeting. This will help chairs to select a representative cross section and illustrate the range of research that is going on in the community. Chairs will make these statements available to the instructors six months ahead of time as a help for designing the detailed program. We will also ask attendees after the meeting to evaluate the usefulness of the workshop in furthering their understanding of the constraints that pertain to their research based on their initial statements of interest.

The morning program will be filled with two hour-long review lectures whose aim is to bring everybody up to speed about topics that pertain to the meeting's theme. There will be at least a half hour set aside for discussions immediately after each presentation. Lecturers are expected to refrain from presenting only their own current work but should focus on communicating an insider's view as to why their part of the community thinks the way it does at the moment, and how different pieces of the multi-disciplinary puzzle fit together. An important outcome will be a better understanding of data and constraints each discipline provides on the problem in question. We think that it will be important to have primary source material available for the tutorial sessions for each discipline, and intend to recommend a reading list of $\sim$5 important papers each as suggested reading. The respective list of references will be distributed in advance, and as a photocopied reader, for which reproduction permission will be requested from the copyright holders, during the conference.

The morning tutorials form an integral part of MYRES, and their preparation will require significant effort from the speakers. However, we think that this effort will pay off in the short term for both speakers and attendees and also contribute to our long-term educational impact, as outlined below. To ensure a high quality instructional program, keynote lecturers will meet well in advance of the meeting ($\sim$ 3 months) to agree on a comprehensive and well-rounded curriculum, to commit to presenting certain topics that will complement each other, and to review each others lecture slides. We include a request for funding a weekend recess in the spring preceding the meeting for keynote lecturers to facilitate the preparation of the program.

After the morning presentations, smaller groups will be able to meet during the afternoon in dedicated meeting rooms to explore sub-topics, specific problems, or methods in greater detail, possibly guided by the presenters and conveners of the morning. This will serve to shrink the conference and encourage participation by less vocal conferees. Depending on the topic of the meeting, afternoon sessions could also entail hands-on exercises and mini-workshops on computer tools and data analysis. However, in the spirit of the Gordon Conferences, the majority of the afternoon will be left open for informal discussion and socializing.

Evening sessions will include individual poster presentations of attendees, if appropriate, but will focus on an open discussion of the issues that were brought up during the day. These sessions will be moderated by a panel composed of the morning's speakers. Communal sessions will re-address how findings from different fields have been integrated so far and how novel avenues of research could be stipulated. The sessions will also provide a forum for discussion of the attendees' research, but monopolization of the proceedings by a select few will be actively discouraged by the panel. All attendees will, however, be expected to give a micro presentation ($\sim$3 min) in one of the evening sessions. These presentations will entail showing one overhead and describing the questions they wish to address, or the current state of their research. The aim of these micro-presentations is to stimulate an active involvement of every attendee, to introduce each participant to the group, to get an overview of what different members of the community are working on, and to give students a chance to practice communicating their agenda clearly in a limited time.

After each MYRES, a short write up of the major outcomes of the meeting in terms of discussions will be published in EOS and on the web. More importantly, all instructional material will be made available online. To facilitate this publishing process, all keynote lectures will have to be given as electronic presentations in either PDF or Microsoft Powerpoint format, which we will convert to HTML to create a library of portable electronic documents that can serve as a reference and will grow during the lifetime of the MYRES conference series. Our copyright policy for use of the online conference proceedings will allow free classroom and scientific usage (registration with the current chairs or the MYRES office will be encouraged), while other usage will require the prior approval of the lecturer or original scientists.