I’ve always collected New Year’s resolutions. My 2015 New Year’s resolution is to stop texting my children in my house – while I’m in the house.
Communication is a lost art.
Recently, the AAPG Division of Professional Affairs held its mid-year meeting in Tulsa, and this year we are focused on the “Culture of Greatness” – the ability of our industry and profession to provide resources.
We started the meeting with a review of our strategic/business plan, which focused the group on DPA’s culture: leadership, professionalism, ethics, certification, networking, education and communication of best business practices.
One of the primary goals in the meeting was to discuss and communicate our goals not only to the DPA leadership but also to Young Professionals interested in joining DPA.
The meeting centered on:
♦ Membership (of course).
For membership the DPA council has taken on several new programs, but the first is to search out active AAPG members and ask them via an invitation from three DPA members to join.
This is a lot of fun, as active AAPG members are often interested in joining DPA. I’ve had many respond, “I’ve thought about joining for years but was never personally invited.”
The second program is to attract young professionals to join DPA. To that end we asked five young professionals to join us this year at the mid-year meeting. As most of you know, you need about seven-plus years of experience to join DPA, depending on your academic degrees.
The good news is, many of the young professionals who started early in the resource play boom are now approaching that experience level.
As a result we had great discussions on mentoring, continuing education and other DPA opportunities. Our primary “take-away” was to establish a “DPA Young Professionals” program, so we can start mentoring those who are interested in DPA and provide early guidance on career development.
♦ Section and Region reports and needs.
Many of the Sections and Regions provided reports at the meeting. A key discussion item was how to make DPA more viable outside of the United States. The status of certification was discussed, especially with regard to how it relates to geoscientists worldwide.
The general consensus: DPA needs to brand its business and professional expertise to non-U.S. professionals.
We also discussed plans to make sure DPA is represented at all Section and Region meetings.
♦ DPA forums and continuing education.
We had a lot of discussion on DPA “Gathering and Learning Services.” The new DPA Playmaker Forums ([PFItemLinkShortcode|id:14084|type:standard|anchorText:related article|cssClass:asshref|title:DPA Playmaker Forums article|PFItemLinkShortcode]) are a key part of serving our members and industry professionals.
Currently, we have three Playmaker Forums scheduled for the remainder of this fiscal year (winter-spring 2015) located in Midland, Texas; Calgary, Canada and London.
Our continuing education also is a key part of our program and we plan more courses around meetings including courses on ethics, reserves and geosteering.
♦ Governmental affairs.
Regarding governmental affairs we had a good discussion on the status of the Geo-DC office. There was general consensus that it was good to educate congressional staffs on resource issues but we would like to be more effective.
A review is planned.
♦ New programs and initiatives.
Finally we discussed new programs and initiatives. One of the most interesting is a review of industry and public opinion of frac’ing and water injection. As you know, there are controversial data out there – especially in regards to earthquakes.
We agreed to establish a new committee to review available information and decide if we should recommend a “White Paper” to the AAPG Executive Committee.
We also discussed the growing topic of Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR. This has applications through DPA for professionalism, ethics and governmental affairs.
We decided a better term may be “Social License,” as it relates to responsibility to all parties involved – government, public and industry.
Stay tuned for more.
All in all we had an excellent meeting and moved DPA a little further down the road.
Now, we look forward to a great year in 2015. Please come and join us!