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1. Former Columbia staff member, Alena Ptak Danchak, has agreed to do some free, part-time , free 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.
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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. 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 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.