Team meeting 20120817

Present

Iain Wright, Silvia Silvestri, Vish Nene, Ewen Le Borgne.

Minutes

Hello all,

And today we had a majority (4 out of 6) to discuss ILRI seminars so hereby the key discussion/decision points and Skype notes fyi.

• We need to clarify what we cover for our ILRI seminars – so others are clear about it when proposing ideas too. We’ll have some criteria to qualify proposal ideas;
• For September Michael’s Blummel idea of work on food/feeds is scheduled. A small sub-team (Iain, Vish, Ewen, Susan) will organize this one;
• Each theme/team should fish ideas for possible seminar ideas and this will be restated at the upcoming MC-TL meeting next week;
• We need to promote these seminars officially from D/DG office too.
• Even though each team will fish for ideas, they should always keep Silvia informed (as the contact person for ideas).
• Because lots of us present at many conferences it’d be useful to have more dry-runs. We can encourage this though it’s not our task to ensure it happens.
• We should use the new ILRI template asap and not develop a dedicated template for these seminars.
• Unless anyone finds a better term in the next 2 weeks, we’ll go with ‘livestock live talks’ as the name for this series of seminars.

Action points: - Ewen to set up list of criteria on the wiki page with proposal ideas; - All to qualify proposal ideas for seminars against these criteria (to justify whether we should organize them as part of our series or not) on this wiki page; - Iain to present the seminars and fish for additional ideas from each theme/team at upcoming MC-TL; - Vish, Silvia and Tezira to fish for ideas with their teams as well – and to inform Silvia about it; - Susan and Ewen to work on information text (blog post?) to support message from D/DG to introduce this series of seminars and encourage attendance; - Anyone to suggest an alternative title for the seminars?

Next discussion in 2 weeks.

Cheers,

Ewen

NOTES OF THE SKYPE DISCUSSION ========================== http://ilriseminars.wikispaces.com/Upcoming+seminars Need to improve our 'calibration' of seminars Iain: agreed - perhaps we haven't been clear enough Many good ideas in the list but a lot of them are not really part of our list of seminars We could have a simple list of criteria for these seminars on the wiki so are best prepared to answer proposal ideas ACTION: Ewen to put together the criteria and all to go through list of projects and qualify them against criteria Next seminar: Michael on 'food and feeds' - Iain to check with S. Kemp about this (a small group is organizing a workshop with a wider range of people to think about food and feeds etc.) - unclear how far that group is The plan is to organize a 2-day workshop about this to strategize around this area of reserach Food and feed: Iain, Vish, Susan and Ewen supporting ACTION POINT: Iain will present (during MC-TL) the seminars and fish for ideas from each theme/team Silvia to collect PLE ideas And Vish to do the same for bio-tech

Message Delia (and our thinking about it): I think whats missing is Tom's idea of high level seminars – a series of 3 or 4 a year to address fundamental questions on livestock which the world wants answers on. The seminar is an opportunity to catalyse thinking round this. 'à' Agreed and already planned. Also an under-used resource is the presentations we are doing for conferences: over the next few months is ISVEE (25 ILRI scientists and students), Kunming Ecohealth (15 ILRI scientists and parnters), Ag Econ Brazil (10 scientists), Bkk meeting etc. It would be very easy to ask people to give seminars they are preparing for these conferences or have just given. 'à' OK, sure, though some of these seminars are very specific. But when fishing for seminar ideas we can ask our colleagues if one of the presentations they will be giving could be appropriate for this series of seminars too. If we want all scientists to give at least one seminar a year the easiest way is to put it in their workplan 'à' Great idea but not in our remit to ensure. This is at D/DG level. We can just encourage staff to do this. Don't we have a new ILRI template for orals with the purple along the top? Good to circulate this 'à' Draft new template available (attached) but needs to be finalised. Susan to tell us more about this?

Iain: We need to have commitment from Jimmy down for these seminars - Jimmy or Steve or sb has to send an email to encourage all to attend seminars.

The other idea is to encourage around the themes/teams etc. We need to make sure that the message comes from DG/DDG etc. and that people in the themes also contribute ideas Generally we should have more dry-runs of the presentations (to get internal feedback) for all conference presentations we are preparing In practice it's quite difficult to organize it - it boils down to the presenter and a couple of people and fizzles out... But we should encourage it as much as possible... Just use one template for all presentations - not specific for seminars

Cheers,

Ewen