Dear GEM colleagues and friends,

As we are closing another very successful virtual mini-GEM workshop, I would like to thank all of you for attending and sharing your ideas. Hope you enjoyed the Focus Group discussions and planning for the 2021 GEM Summer Workshop (stay tuned for updates whether it will be virtual, hybrid, or in-person).

If you would like to get more involved with GEM leadership, we have an open search for an At-Large member on the Steering Committee (SC). We invite applications for this position by March 20, 2021. Please submit a brief (no more than two pages) CV and a separate statement (about a half page) describing your interest in the position, to the current GEM SC Chair (vania at lanl.gov) and Vice-Chair (akellerman at epss.ucla.edu). This is a great opportunity to contribute to the future directions of GEM!

Please feel free to reach out to your favorite SC member with any questions or suggestions you might have, we need your input.

Hello, GEM community! We invite your participation at the virtual Mini-GEM Workshop, which will be held via Zoom telecommunications during January 19 – 22, 2021, from 10am – 2pm EST. The Focus Groups have scheduled 2-hour Zoom sessions, advertised through the GEM Messenger, GEM Wiki, and in their respective Slack channels (gemworkshop.slack.com). Student townhall meetings are organized during different time zones to enhance international student participation. The full Mini-GEM schedule and session info are available here and at the GEM Workshop website (gemworkshop.org). This is a great opportunity to discuss latest research on the near-earth portion of geospace. The topics will include as well preparation for the upcoming Heliophysics 2050 workshop, the Decadal Survey, and the GEM summer workshop. Attendance is free of charge, no registration fee.

Happy and Healthy New Year 2021! Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions, comments or concerns you might have, I look forward to hearing from you.

Hello, GEM community! You may have noticed a bit of a gap between posts here. There has been some work going on behind the scenes – in particular, we ramping up our preparations for the summer workshop, including the GEM plenary sessions and the joint GEM/SHINE day on the Saturday between the individual workshops. Let us know if you have any suggestions about these workshops; otherwise stay tuned for announcements!

In addition, we’re thinking ahead to future workshops. The upcoming 2020 meeting will be back-to-back with SHINE. We’ve decided that 2021 will be a solo GEM workshop; it will be the thirtieth anniversary of the first GEM workshop. Also, we recently decided that for 2022 we will pursue a back-to-back workshop with CEDAR. Locations for both the 2021 and 2022 workshops are being investigated.

As always, stay tuned to the GEM Messenger Newsletter and this blog for more announcements!

This post is to provide some additional information about Mini-GEM Steering Committee results that were not covered in the recent GEM Messenger newsletter.

(1) Lisa Winter from NSF provided a brief update, including the new solicitation for space weather proposals (https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505758). She reminded everyone that the GEM and base programs have no deadlines, so proposals can be submitted any time. In her words, NSF AGS is “open for business”!

(2) There will be a joint GEM-SHINE day in between the two summer workshops on July 18. We selected a team of folks to work with representatives to SHINE to organize the joint session. Special thanks to Joe Borovsky, John Lyon, and Brian Walsh for volunteering for this activity; Vania Jordanova and I will also help. Please contact any of the five of us if you have ideas for this joint session!

(3) Stay tuned for some updates to how GEM does its communications, associated with Peter Chi rotating off from his role as the Communications Coordinator. He has performed outstanding service to the GEM community for such a long time and we offer him our sincere gratitude for his efforts – please thank him when you see him next! Consequently, there will be changes both to the GEM Messenger newsletter and the GEMStone annual report that Peter has been overseeing. We are pursuing a new client for the GEM Messenger, so stay tuned for some emails about that (likely in the new year). We have gotten feedback in favor of the approach Peter has used (distributing every week or two) and will preserve that even with the upcoming changes. The Steering Committee decided the GEMStone is still of value to the community and will continue it.

(4) The next Steering Committee meeting will be a telecon in the Spring. If you have any matters you would like us to discuss, please let me know! We will be making some decisions about some new ideas that have been brought up for the summer workshop, so stay tuned on that too!

That about covers it! I continue to extol the virtues of the fantastic folks we have serving the community on the Steering Committee. It’s a great group of conscientious and thoughtful scientists – we’re a lucky community for having them!

It has been some time since the last blog entry, but the ramp up to the Mini-GEM meeting is in full swing! The signature feature of GEM workshops is the focus groups, which come from the community. We solicit proposals once a year. The deadline was last Friday, and we got six proposals (a healthy number). Each proposal team will have a chance to present and defend their proposal in the 5pm session at Mini-GEM. Those selected will be announced in the days/weeks following the AGU meeting.

We will also be announcing the membership of the Methods and Validations Resource Group. This is an outgrowth of the methods and validations focus groups that GEM has had, with the idea that it will be a permanent resource for community members needing help with methods and validation in their focus group activities.

Hope to see you in San Francisco, and safe travels! If there are matters you would like the Steering Committee to consider, I invite you to reach out!

Well, the GEM Steering Committee (SC) had it’s first ever (that I know of) “Fall GEM SC meeting” last Friday, a virtual meeting to address a number of topics that couldn’t wait until our next in-person meeting. It was a marathon 2 hour (!) meeting covering a wide range of topics. We truly are lucky to have such a great group of people on the SC that took time out of their busy schedules for this meeting.

The minutes are in the process of being posted online at the GEM Wiki under “Other Documents and Reports” (they should be up there soon). I won’t rehash all of what is in the minutes or repeat what will be summarized in an upcoming GEM Messenger announcement, but there are a few things there that are relevant to share some perspective here (since the whole point of having this blog is to enhance transparency and enable communication about GEM governance).

One of the more bold moves the SC made was to change the duration of the terms of its members. The Research Area Coordinator (RAC) terms were set up as six year terms, with two people per Research Area (RA) with terms staggered by three years. Each of the five RAs had one person cycle off at the same time. This led to a significant turnover in the SC all at the same time. Moreover, there was concern amongst the SC that six year terms are quite long, which can lead to diminished returns after a while and also prevent new people from joining the SC and bringing in fresh perspectives and ideas. After numerous discussions dating back to last year, the SC voted to change the terms in two ways: (1) terms for RACs are now four years instead of six, and (2) the terms have been staggered so that we do not have a major part of the SC all rotating off at the same time. By also changing At-Large positions to be four years instead of three, we now have a system where we will have approximately the same number of SC member terms ending every year. The hope and intention of this change is to keep the ideas fresh, the SC nimble, and to better preserve institutional memory. I’m very proud of the SC for taking this big step and I think this will be a benefit to the community for years to come.

We also had a lengthy and nuanced discussion of whether to allow graduate students to be co-chairs on new focus group proposals. The by-laws were previously silent about this, and graduate students never had led focus groups before. Clarity on this matter is important, and we had a healthy exchange of ideas of the merits of either side of the coin. In the end, we decided to not allow it. Of course one of the defining characteristics of GEM is how welcoming it is for graduate students, and GEM continues to have many ways that graduate students can (and do!) contribute, and we know this will continue going forward.

Otherwise, we approved a new liaison (welcome, Tom Elsden from MIST in the UK!) and proposed an update to GEM’s anti-harassment policy according to suggestions from my Title IX office to better promote a safe environment for all our meeting attendees.

We got quite a lot accomplished at the meeting, but there is still much more to do! Stay tuned for more, and share your suggestions to your favorite SC member!

For the first time I know of, the GEM Steering Committee (SC) will have a meeting outside of normal GEM meeting times. The SC traditionally met once at the Summer Workshop and once at the Mini-GEM before AGU. What started as in informal wrap-up after the Summer Workshop under Mike Wiltberger turned into another full-fledged SC meeting under Jacob Bortnik, giving the SC three meetings per year. Thanks to an unusual number of timely matters that have come up, the SC is going to meet again – this time in a couple of weeks by via video conference!

The meeting will address a number of important matters that shouldn’t wait until December, such as filling the open At-Large SC position, the need for guidelines about graduate students applying to lead or co-lead focus groups, updates to the anti-harassment policy, SC term lengths and whether to stagger the terms more than they are, a potential new Liaison, prepping for the 2020 GEM Summer Workshop (to be back-to-back with SHINE), etc.

I can’t say enough good things about the members of the SC for their willingness to devote this extra time into GEM. I’m excited that 84% of the voting SC members will be able to attend, which is fantastic representation for an ad hoc meeting (or any meeting for that matter!). Thanks to them for their efforts! We’ll put out minutes for the Fall SC meeting ASAP, which should be in early/mid September.

You may be aware that we had a special lunch session at the 2019 GEM Workshop on the topic of underrepresented people at GEM. I’ve been asked by folks for a summary of the session, so that’s the subject of today’s entry.

The planning for the session was a result of a long set of discussions with the plenary session organizing committee, consisting of the following GEM Steering Committee members – myself (chair), Hyunju Connor, Raluca Ilie, Allison Jaynes, Brian Walsh, and Chih-Ping Wang, with ex officio members Jacob Bortnik, Chia-Lin Huang, and Chris Mouikis. After much discussion, we decided on a session intended to give community members the opportunity to speak and listen to others about matters affecting underrepresented people. However, attendance would be open to anyone, not just underrepresented community members. To construct an event following best practices as much as possible, we called in reinforcements from people from my Title IX office at WVU, who have been a fantastic help and support in previous matters I’ve bugged them about in support of GEM, including helping to edit the GEM anti-harassment policy.

The session took place on the Wednesday of the workshop, and was attended by 43 people. Everyone sat in tables of small groups, which had approximately 8 per table. (This is a bit on the high side for group size.) A pizza lunch was provided. We started with an icebreaker, which was recommended by my Title IX office because it helps get people comfortable talking about heady issues. We took a GEM-themed approach to this, which made it fun and challenging!

Then, there was a brief (~10 minute) presentation about the goals of the session and and overview of concepts. For this session, we focused on the topics of diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI). We defined each term and reinforced the definitions with sketches recommended by my Title IX office. We discussed the distinctions of these terms by working through what each would look like if the other two weren’t present. For the purposes of this session, we focused on equity and inclusivity at GEM.

Then, in the small groups, attendees were asked to discuss what GEM does well to achieve equity at its workshops and how GEM could improve equity. Each group was given 10 minutes to discuss and make notes of their group discussion, then the groups were brought together to share their responses for each question. Each group was given the opportunity to contribute. Then, this exercise was repeated for inclusivity instead of equity.

Finally, as a group, attendees were asked to make a value judgment of what responses they heard were the most important, and anyone had a chance to answer. A participant survey was given about the session, and the responses of each small group were collected by the organizers.

While the primary goal was to provide a safe space for community members to talk about these important matters, we also achieved a secondary goal. By collecting the responses from each small group, we now have record from the community about what GEM does well and needs to improve. These comments will form the basis of a strategic plan on diversity, equity, and inclusivity at GEM that will be produced in the coming months and publicly released.

We are grateful to the community members that attended and so conscientiously shared their thoughts and comments, and hope this can be a driver for positive change in the community! I know I say this every time, but please let me know if you have any additional comments or suggestions! It’s not too late to add more to what will become the GEM DEI Strategic Plan!