Following the open and grass-roots philosophy of MYRES, we aim to eventually have the community as a whole be involved in the development of new meeting topics. The first meeting program and personnel list was drafted after consulting with many junior and senior members on a previous version of this proposal which we sent out in the spring of 2002. We furthermore presented and discussed the MYRES concept at the NSF sponsored CIDER workshop (Pt. Reyes, CA, May 2003), held an informational meeting at the GRC meeting on the Interior of the Earth (South Hadley, MA, June 2003), and posted various versions of this proposal on the MYRES web page6 to invite comments. This proposal incorporates the suggestions of the community if they were unambiguous, but necessarily has to reflect our choices after deliberation of the pros and cons, if different alternatives were suggested.
If we obtain funding for this proposal, we will strive to broaden the range of researchers involved in MYRES beyond that accessible to us right now. We will announce a request for proposals for the second MYRES meeting in EOS and on the MYRES web site. However, we will initially restrict themes for MYRES II to be from outside deep Earth research, such as the example followup meeting on plate boundary processes outlined in appendix B.1. The function of the MYRES website for this competition is to create an online forum for the exchange of ideas and suggestions for current and future meetings to allow for a flexible institutional structure and a self-organized review process. We will experiment with having an informal online voting system to judge the interest of the community in specific future MYRES meeting topics.
The first meeting should be considered a pilot project; we will critically evaluate MYRES' format and the self-organizing mechanisms for future meetings. Appendix A.1 lists the suggested personnel involved in the first meeting, including the list of conveners and keynote lecturers who have agreed to take part in the first MYRES. An integral part of MYRES will be the evaluation of each conference and the progress of the conference series by means of exit and follow-up surveys, as detailed in section 6 and appendix D. The results of these surveys will be accessible online, and we intend to extensively use the feedback we get to learn from this experience and improve the second workshop. We will aim to demonstrate the usefulness of MYRES and intend to establish a long-term conference series by reapplying for funds after the initial two meetings have been conducted.