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This is a guest post written by Jürgen Kusche, who has convened numerous sessions on various international conferences, and had the wonderful idea to use the geodesy division blog to initiate an open discussion on the topic session convening. For that reason, readers are encouraged to comment at the end of this post. Currently, Jürgen Kusche is professor at the Chair of Astronomical, Mathematical and Physical Geodesy at Bonn University in Germany.  One of the nice things of the EGU way of organizing a conference is that everybody can suggest sessions, not only the ‘officials’. This is an important option to allow young scientists develop experiences and a sense for service to the community. It also allows to create sessions more ‘adaptive’, e.g. in order to support spectacular new findings from some satellite data release, or in response to natural disasters. But maybe the system has become less flexible now. I notice that some geodesy sessions are organized by the same distinguished scientists nearly over decades. While this has its merits, as it guarantees continuity and the highest level of scientific knowledge in organizing the sessions, sometimes it may congest the path for creating new sessions by new, younger convenors. True, everybody is invited to propose a session and one may argue, let the new ones compete with the established ones in terms of abstract submissions. But this does not work well since all session proposals tend to be formulated very wide in order to attract contributions. Having too many sessions competing for the same group does not make the program attractive. This may be an argument for simply limiting the convenor service, in the same session, to terms of, say four years. This way, new people would be brought in. True, the EGU rules do not allow that the division presidents stipulate, let alone enforce, such rules. But we, as G division, might give us a code of conduct? I’d would be happy to see your thoughts on this placed as comments here

Walking the halls of the EGU General Assembly 2025 a few weeks ago, I was full of child-like curiosity. Being surrounded by people doing fascinating, creative, and innovative research felt like a drea...