#LPSC2018: Collaborative notes from conference sessions

At last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, I tried a new experiment: collaborating with other attendees to take a shared set of notes. It worked well, and I'm ready to deploy it at future conferences with more notetakers. It is especially valuable for multi-track conferences like LPSC, where there might be three different rooms I wanted to be in at the same time. There were three people besides me who contributed the lion's share of the notes: Harriet Brettle, Sierra Ferguson, and Lori Glaspie. All reported that the exercise was useful for them as it was for me. At the end of this document, you'll find links to PDFs of our collective conference session notes.

My procedure:

• Announce on Twitter and in the blog that I was looking for notetakers
• Pre-populate a set of Google docs, one for each session, containing talk titles and author lists copied from the conference program, using heading styles for clarity
• Grant edit access to the docs, instructing notetakers to make their own block of text beneath each talk title
• Convert the docs to PDFs and post them here

One thing I wanted to do -- but did not figure out how -- is to incorporate the notes being taken on Twitter. Many people like Patrick Donohue, Martin Hajovksy, Jörn Helbert, Patrick McGovern, Jen Newman, Julie Rathbun, Ed Rivera-Valentín, Jake Robins, Natasha Stephen, Angela Stickle, and Ryan Watkins contributed significant numbers of tweets to the #LPSC2018 hashtag. I gathered many of the tweets that were so tagged in a spreadsheet using an IFTTT applet, but sometimes the rate of tweeting overwhelmed the applet, and not everyone used the hashtag on every tweet, and I can't think of a non-laborious way to incorporate those tweets into the notes. So I'd appreciate advice or suggestions on how to do that better. Perhaps in the future I could engage some volunteers who are unable to attend the conference to watch the feeds of conference "supertweeters", assigning individual tweeps to a volunteer who would copy and paste their notes into the notes documents once a day.

Before I get to the notes, I want to share one other cool thing: links to full-resolution photos of James Tuttle Keane's sketches from the meeting. It's always fun to see these pop up in my Twitter feed. It's almost as fun to see the excitement of scientists when they "get Keaned"! He's named the files after the presenters, so here they are, in alphabetical order:

Bapst - Bland - Bramson - Citron - Costello - deKleer - Deutsch - Dombard - Genova - Getzin - Glaze  - Glaze (transparent TIF) - Mao - Miller - Minton - O'Hara - Otto - Porco - Rivera-Valentín - Schools - Schurmeier - Scully - Sori - Spilker - Thompson - Tikoo - Vos - White

Also: LPSC2018 - behind-the-scenes-1 - behind-the-scenes-2 - behind-the-scenes-3 - behind-the-scenes-4 - Microsymposium

AND: Thanks also to Leila Qışın who also shared her notebook full of sketches! (zip, 44MB)

Following is the conference session program with links to notes documents. I want to thank Harriet Brettle, Sierra Ferguson, Lori Glaspie, Sarah Lamm, and Andy Rivkin for participating in my experiment. It was a small group and we didn't cover all the sessions, nor did we try to. Only sessions for which we have notes are linked below; no link means no notes. If you took notes at any of these sessions and want to contribute, send me an email! Also email me if you'd like to copy and paste from the hashtagged tweets spreadsheet or supertweeters tweet archives into notes documents!

Monday Morning, March 19, 8:30 a.m.

• M101 Celebrating Cassini I
• M102 Planetary Volatiles: It’s Not All About the Water
• M103 Mars Downslope Mass Movement I: RSLs, Gullies, and Landslides (no notes, but here is a guest blog)
• M104 Astrobiology I: Looking for Life on Mars, Microbial Impact of Human Exploration, Curation Contamination Measurements
• M105 Protoplanetary Disks I: Dynamics and Reservoirs

Monday Afternoon, March 19, 1:30 p.m.

• Plenary Session: Masursky Lecture and Award Presentations

Monday Afternoon, March 19, 2:30 p.m.

• M151 Mars Atmosphere
• M152 Differentiated Meteorites I: A Playlist of Parent Bodies
• M153 Improved Science Through the Implementation of a Planetary Spatial Data Infrastructure I
• M154 Presolar, Interplanetary, and Cometary Dust
• M155 Mars Polar Caps Where Ice Lingers

Monday Afternoon, March 19, 5:30 p.m.

• NASA Headquarters Briefing

Tuesday Morning, March 20, 8:30 a.m.

• T201 Early Mars Surface Processes I: Valley Networks, Oceans(?), and the Hydrologic Cycle
• T202 Asteroids I: NEAs, PHAs, and MBAs, Oh My!
• T203 Titan is Terrific, also here is my blog
• T204 Improving Understanding of Lunar Chronology: The Key to Time
• T205 Chondrites and Their Components I: Nebular Processes

Tuesday Afternoon, March 20, 1:30 p.m.

• T251 Early Mars Surface Processes II: Alluvial Fans and Paleolakes
  followed at 3:00 p.m. by
  T252 Aqueous Alteration on Mars I: Results from Rovers, Meteorites, and Analogs
• T253 Ceres: Seriously a New Dawn
• T254 21st Century Venus I: Atmosphere to Interior
• T255 Origin and Igneous Evolution of the Moon
• T256 Impacts I: Planetary Impact Cratering

Tuesday Evening, March 20, 6:00 p.m.

• Poster session

Wednesday Morning, March 21, 8:20 a.m.

• W404 Taurus-Littrow Valley I: 45 Years After Apollo 17
• Wednesday Morning, March 21, 8:30 a.m.
• W401 Mineralogy of Mars from Orbital Data I: Wet or Dry, Hot or Cold, Habitable or Not?
• W402 Tectonics and Interior Dynamics: Crunchy Outside, Chewy Inside
• W403 Aeolian Geology II: The Answer is Blowin’ in the Wind
• W405 Protoplanetary Disks II: Mass Immigration
  followed at 10:15 a.m. by
  W406 Chondrites and Their Components II: Metals and Organics

Wednesday Afternoon, March 21, 1:30 p.m.

• W451 Aqueous Alteration on Mars II: Results from Rovers, Meteorites, and Analogs
• W452 Space Weathering is Ruining Perfectly Good Planetary Surfaces Across the Solar System
• W453 Planetary Volcanism I: Fire and Fury in the Solar System
  followed at 3:00 p.m. by
  W454 Iron Cores and More
• W455 Taurus-Littrow Valley II: 45 Years After Apollo 17 (no notes, but here is a guest blog)
• W456 Chondrites and Their Components III: Parent Body Processes

Thursday Morning, March 22, 8:30 a.m.

• R501 Volatiles On and Around the Moon
• R502 Geologic History from Curiosity Observations at Gale Crater
• R503 Mercury: First Among Planets I
• R504 Impacts II: Modeling
• R505 Groovy Galilean Satellites

Thursday Afternoon, March 22, 1:30 p.m.

• R551 Lunar Volcanism I
• R552 Mars Rover Results I: Depositional and Environmental History
• R553 Astrobiology II: Life Detection, Origins of Life, Prebiotic Chemistry
  followed at 3:45 p.m. by
  R554 Phobos and Deimos I
• R555 Impacts III: Shock Metamorphism and Experiments
• R556 Pleasant Pluto I
  followed at 3:15 p.m. by
  R557 Incredible Icy Satellites

Thursday Evening, March 22, 6:00 p.m.

• Poster session

Friday Morning, March 23, 8:30 a.m.

• F701 Lunar Geophysics: Gravity, Tectonics, and Magnetism All Swirled Together
• F702 Martian Geochemistry, Petrology, and Chronology I
• F703 Comets and Asteroids: Properties, Processes, 67P, and Stardust
• F704 Dreams of a Glacial Mars
• F705 Impacts IV: Terrestrial Impact Cratering