2CUL TSI Steering Committee meeting, 10 June 2013
Participants: Adam, Kate, Jim, Boaz
1. Former Columbia staff member, Alena Ptak Danchak, has agreed to do some free, part-time consultant work for us in late-June / early July. Among her tasks will be to: (1) review and comment on TSI work to date, (2) advise on methodology for evaluating and organizing Phase 1 reports, and (3) offer advice on Phase 2, including team formation and project management. Kate will work with Alena, providing an introduction and background to our work and pointing her to the TSI wiki. Jim will give her temporary access to the TSI Basecamp project pages.
Although we see this arrangement as a source of free, experienced input, we are concerned that our collective time investment may not be worth the potential gain. We also feel that her investigation might be "destabilizing" and send an unwelcome message to the working groups (i.e. that we've enlisted an outside consultant to advise them). For this reason, we will not give her access to TSI working group participants. We agreed, though, the members of the SC would make themselves available (within reason) to answer questions. Kate will ask Bob and Xin if they'd be willing to provide input.
2. Xin Li has arranged with a colleague at MIT, Tracy Gabridge, to talk to us about a major reorganization they undertook at that institution. Jim will contact the folks at MIT about the video presentation they shared with Xin and the additional org chart she requested. He will also ask if they've published anything about the reorg, either internally or externally. After we review this material we will prepare some TSI-related questions and propose a WebEx or conference call with MIT reps for sometime later in the summer. We are also curious about what Robert knows about this reorg from his contact(s) there.
3. We began talking about how to plan for TSI Phase 2. We agreed that it would be good to wait until we have the Phase 1 reports from the working groups in hand, have had a chance to read them along with their accompanying data, and gotten word about the yea or nay decision to implement Alma in June 2015 before moving forward with Phase 2 planning. Jim will ask Laurie to work with us to establish dates for two in-person TSI Steering Committee meetings -- one for the 3rd or 4th week of August; the other for the 2nd or 3rd week of September. These two in-person sessions will give us time for some extensive brainstorming about how we'd like to see Phase 2 play out.