Presidential Column

The regular monthly CSEG Executive meeting took place on May 27. As usual the on-going business was taken care of. Some items are worth mentioning to keep you informed of what is on-going within your society.

Convention

The convention was discussed briefly, and feedback was o ff e red. Our voice to the convention committee is Jon Downton, Vice President. He listened to the feedback offered and will pass on the information to the committees.

Online

As we are finally moving into the electronic age, our database was moved online earlier this year. Our staff is currently using this new database, and it will be rolled out to the general membership by year-end. The plan is to off e r membership renewal online by the end of the year. As the year progresses, you might see some online services being offered: luncheon tickets will likely be the first that you will see in the fall. Associated with this new database, we had to ensure that our server could handle the extra demand from the members. We have a solution that was put in place in January of this year. As we do not know if it is the best solution, we have a small committee that will look at the various options, including working in cooperation with the CSPG: since we share office space, we might be able to save some money by sharing some aspects of a server. Corey Hooge and John Townsley have graciously accepted to review the current situation with respect to our server. It could be the status quo, or a different option. Corey and John will work with the CSPG as well to evaluate the situation and will make recommendations to the executive in the fall.

With the implementation of our new membership database that will facilitate online transactions and other extended online services, we were able to start looking at our membership statistics. This is in addition to the membership survey that we conducted last December/January. In this case, we can extract information on type of membership in CSEG (the types of membership are: Active, Student, Retired, Honorary, Unemployed) from our over than 2000 members. It was not surprising to find more than 90% of our members under the “Active” category, and also over 90% living in Alberta. We are also happy to see more than 5% of our members living outside Canada: this speaks to the high quality of our services to our members, with the RECORDER being the main voice of CSEG reaching those members.

Long-time Members

We are currently looking at options to honour and thank our long time members. How do we define ‘long time’ members? This will be tackle by our Member Services committee: Torr Haglund, Assistant Director of Member Services, is keen to pursue this initiative.

Technical Luncheon

A joint CSEG/CSPG Technical Luncheon will host the SEG/AAPG Distinguished Lecturer in September. An announcement appears elsewhere in this issue of the RECORDER.

APEGGA

On May 28, APEGGA held its Geoscience Committee Meeting. This meeting was partly in preparation for the upcoming CCPG meeting to be held the following weekend (which I address below). Compliance in the Geoscience is one of the main issues facing APEGGA. Professionalism was also discussed: courses on professionalism could be expanded in universities, and also off e red as part of continuing education. A brief update on the state of CSEG was p resented: the results of our membership survey were mentioned, as well as JACC (Joint Annual Convention Committee) with the 5-year rolling agreement between the CSEG and the CSPG to host joint conventions. The CWLS is expected to join this agreement as well.

CCPG

I attended the Canadian Council of Professional Geoscientists (CCPG: www.ccpg.ca) Board of Directors’ Meeting and Annual Meeting of Council in Winnipeg on May 31 as representative and observer for the CSEG. The main issues facing the CCPG are: licensure, mobility across Canada and from other nations, knowledge and experience standards, compliance. The CCPG is composed of “Constituent Associations – CA’s”, that are the provincial licensing bodies for Geoscientists. The CA’s represent over 10,000 geoscientists whether they are full P.Geo or GIT’s (Professional Geoscientists – Geologists or Geophysicists – or Geoscientists-In-Training). The number of geoscientists registered with their provincial regulatory body (APEGGA or equivalent in other jurisdictions) is as follows:

I presented a brief overview of the CSEG to this gathering of about 50 representatives from across Canada. I outlined the size of our society, its services both on the technical achievements and the social events as well as our annual convention, presented a summary of the results of our membership survey, and praised the role of our volunteers.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

As announced earlier in the April issue of the RECORDER, Satinder Chopra, RECORDER Editor, and Michael Enachescu, CSEG Director of Communications, have proposed guidelines for publishing peer-reviewed articles in the RECORDER. With the demise of the CSEG Journal some years ago, we are excited to be able to offer again a venue for this kind of articles. We all look forward to the first of these articles. Watch your RECORDER in the fall!

Summer Break

With the coming summer months, we are all looking forward to taking a break. The executive does not meet in July and August. I look forward to giving you an update in the September RECORDER.