President's column Our Society has a wealth of technical content, and it is rapidly growing. The value of that technical content derives from the quality of it. Having high-quality content will continue to strengthen SPE’s professional reputation, which is critical when entering new and emerging markets, attracting new members, and, most importantly, maintaining and engaging our current members and corporate sponsors. Our technical content that is consumed daily by our members is also the source of knowledge for the incoming generation, and we need to ensure that it is of the highest quality for our future innovators and leaders to excel. To strengthen the quality of SPE’s technical content, I have outlined the following objectives: 1) Increase the awareness and use of all the tools and methods provided to authors to create high-quality papers 2) Educate program committees about their roles and responsibilities toward working with authors to ensure technical quality 3) Establish methods by which to track technical quality within SPE’s published and presented content 4) Support and develop a better process for formal peer review. When I started as a professional member, there was a strong sense of pride around getting an abstract selected and having the final paper worthy of the SPE logo appearing on it. Companies took pride in having their employees become authors and got very involved in the writing of the manuscript, as their name would also appear on it. Some of the more involved companies garnered an industry reputation of publishing very high-quality papers, and those presentation rooms would be standing room only as a result.• As SPE has expanded the number of conferences globally, more members have the opportunity to have their work included as an SPE paper. I remember submitting my first abstract and getting it accepted. This was in 1997, and it was for a section event that had papered proceedings: The Gulf Coast Section Electric Submersible Pump Workshop. When I informed my management at Chevron that I had an accepted abstract, they rallied mentors to guide me as I wrote the technical paper. They wanted to ensure that the final manuscript was a good one because not only was my name on it, so was theirs. There was a lot of work put into that paper and many rehearsals for the presentation itself. It was a huge learning experience for me not only writing the paper but also enduring the critiques of my peers/mentors, but the result was a paper that I was proud to have my name on and the confidence to present it.• Since my first paper in 1997, SPE membership and events that offer a call for papers have grown substantially. As global membership has increased dramatically, the number of papers from SPE conferences has more than doubled.