Team meeting 20120912

Present: Iain Wright, Susan MacMillan, Tezira Lore, Vish Nene, Ewen Le Borgne.

Minutes: Hereby the key discussion points, decisions and action points: Announcing the seminar series:

• Susan has been in touch with Jimmy and lately told him to add in his message that we are not responsible for other seminars than our 'livestock live talks' series. No answer from Jimmy yet but Susan will contact Terry and Shirley to push this forward so Jimmy can send the message to all staff by tomorrow (or end of week otherwise).
• Muthoni prepared a flyer. That flyer should be tailored to each and every seminar we organize but the burgundy banner on the right hand side should contain the 'why' information. The rest of that banner should contain specific contents related to each seminar.
• Susan will discuss comments made with Muthoni tomorrow morning and circulate a new version for us to review finally.
• Delia seemed keen on inviting journalists to our seminars - we'll have to be cautious about that, to prevent this from backfiring and causing more harm than good.
• Next seminar (Michael's seminar on food and feeds):
• We're trying to see if we can have it on Wednesday 26 instead of Thursday 27 because the latter is Meskel = bank holiday in Ethiopia. Ewen contacted Michael and he seemed ok in principle but should confirm. He's with Silvia in a workshop ending on 26 at half day. Final confirmation should come up tomorrow. Michael is ok for an interactive session but - given the lack of awareness of some audience about the content of his seminar, thinks it would be better to have 30 min of seminar and 30 min of interaction. He will send his draft presentation and some ideas for useful questions to the audience tomorrow.
• At any rate, we expect the announcement (Jimmy's message) to come out tomorrow or end of this week.
• In terms of documentation, we will have a blog post as the central binding piece, including the presentation (uploaded on Slideshare) and the podcast (audio recording). We could develop a slidecast but that's very time-consuming. Ewen investigated with WebEx and it's possible to record everything from the WebEx session (images, audio etc.) but it's using a WebEx proprietary format - which seems possible to convert to e.g. AVI or other common video standard format.
• We will try and collect podcasts for each seminar, to highlight the different nature of these seminars (as opposed to just capturing the PPT on Slideshare).
• Criteria for assessing seminar ideas

Ewen teased out some assessment criteria based on the initial discussions among us which led to the Powerpoint presentation.

We will add two additional criteria to this list: that the speaker has proven ability to speak in public (in a convincing/exciting way), that the topics are controversial and that the seminars are timely (e.g. addressing drought-related livestock issues if a drought is happening). The last 2 are added as 'bonus' criteria.

We decided to separate the list of planned seminars (for everyone to see) and the list of potential seminar ideas and criteria we use for assessment (for our committee to use) so I put it in a separate page: http://ilriseminars.wikispaces.com/Potential+seminar+ideas (unlinked from the menu so you need to use this URL or check 'pages' to find it). Next seminars

- For 31 October, Delia accepted to organize a seminar on zoonoses. The team in charge of helping Delia with this seminar is: Tezira, Susan and (tentatively - can you confirm) Silvia.

- For late November, and although he announced he resigned from ILRI, Mario is still planned to organize a seminar around climate change and livestock. The team in charge of this is: Silvia, Iain and Ewen.

- We have the LIVES seminar planned for December but haven't yet decided who will take care of supporting it.

All seminars for 2013 have to be confirmed.

All planned seminars are on: http://ilriseminars.wikispaces.com/Upcoming+seminars

Delia also had a number of other ideas which she shared with all of us - we'll look into those at our next discussion.

Vish will also follow up with Jimmy on the budget. Welcome to our new member!

We agreed to invite Angela Wafula Nekesa to our regular chats as she has been so helpful with getting a number of knowledge sharing events in Nairobi since she arrived (and she's responsible for internal communication on the campus). Please join me in welcoming Angela! Next chat

Our next chat will be after Michael's seminar, on Friday 28 September (if need be, we can always have another discussion to address any last minute issue).

And the (tentative) agenda will be:

• After action review about Michael's seminar
• Blogging & documentation of seminar
• Organizing next seminars (Delia's and Mario's)
• Other ideas from Delia

Upon reflection, we didn't talk about a simple way to assess the upcoming seminar - should we do it?

Action points • ACTION: Susan to include idea of panel in the message

• ACTION: Susan to contact Terry and Shirley to move this forward with Jimmy

• ACTION: Ewen to follow up with Michael on dates, format of session, presentation

• ACTION: Iain / Vish to follow up on content of Michael's session - and perhaps schedule a tentative dry run session

• ACTION: Susan and Tezira to tweet/Yammer/blog about the session

• ACTION: Ewen and Silvia to help Michael with facilitation

• ACTION: Susan to ask CaSt to send invites to all

• ACTION: Susan to ask Angela to help with this...

• ACTION: Ewen/Susan to bring Angela on board for next meetingACTION: Ewen to touch base with Iain on dates (ISPC) Cheers, Ewen

====

Skype chat minutes:

- Discussing assessment criteria for seminar ideas

- Round of next seminar ideas from different teams (any update anyone?)

- Introduction to staff/partners via Jimmy (update Susan?)

- Preparation of next seminar (following the email I will send to Michael Blummel after this one)

- Organizing a small task team for next seminar if we can identify the topic (to get it going) Vish: We need to ahve a consistent timing for the seminars Muthoni used a bit of 'filler info' that should be updated.

This one is a trial

Michael was aware that he woudl be a guinea pig

Not sure we need a different flyer for internal/external audiences\

In the Burgundy bar we would change the text etc. so we update it for every seminar

We could have the 'why' as consistent info and below that change evertyhing according to the seminar in question

We just need a bit more info from Michael to fill the flyer about this particular seminar / flyer

A few questions would help in this case to entice people to come to the seminar

Susan to go through flyer with Muthoni and all of us to give final advice about it

Can we film the session?

Not likely for now?

Can the presentation be recorded through any program?

We could do a slidecast

Have an audio

We can also try WebEx recording

And other alternative is to do a good quality blog post

We can use the podcast + slideshare pres incorporated in the blog post (Seminar assessment criteria)

http://ilriseminars.wikispaces.com/Upcoming+seminars

Matter for ILRI as a whole

Map ILRI work on this

Could raise or change our game

Engage thought leaders on this

Not just about/for ILRI

2 to add: 1) speaker has a demonstrated ability to speak in public 2) Can we put in a controversial space?

We probably shouldn't shy away from controversy... but perhaps we shouldn't use this as a criteria

3) Timely e.g. topical (drought, president visiting etc.)

ACTION: Ewen to move table on that page into another wiki page (for internal committee discussion) and to add criteria suggested (new criteria 1 & 3 as bonus criteria only)... 3. Next seminars: Delia agreeing on last Wedn of October

Delia suggests students to attend seminars - via CaSt

(message from Delia)

An attractive invite! I think it would be useful to send out (perhaps via CAST) a separate email to all graduate fellows/students/interns saying that as part of their ILRI posting they are expected to attend. For scientists, I guess attendance will be voluntary— we probably need to think about making it more attractive in offering incentives to attend. One way could be to appoint 3-5 people as the 'hard talkers' or 'challengers' who would be asked to sit on a panel to review and rigorously critique the presentation: for me that could be people like JJ, Richard Bishop, Eric Fevre. That would ensure attendance of some of the more important scientists working in an area and at the same time attract people by the prospect of some spirited critique and debate! Another is to request each CRP/theme to appoint a 'feed back person' to attend and feed back to the theme and CRP. There should be an especial invitation for the bloggers and comms people, requesting a blog post from them. In the past, we had a shared seminar series between ILRI, KEMRI, and KARI. If we want these seminars to be high profile, I think it would be worth investing in hiring a bus to collect people who would like to attend from those places as well as our University of Nairobi neigbours and also to invite ICRAF and ICPIPE. As the committee, you might like to communicate with the directors of these institutes to suggest.. Some somewhat random suggestions :) Best (Vish) All good ideas but we don't have any budget

We might need a facilitator to challenge the questions etc.

We haven't discussed how to go about Michael s presentation

During the MC-TL a lot of itnerest from the scientists in the room - all kinds of ideas etc. just as Delia's email demonstrated

We could get Angeline on board for the info centre

Vish to have a word with Jimmy about budget

Are we goign to have journalists in the audience?

But we can't really say no to the journalists eitehr if they want to come...

We remain careful 4. Jimmy's message - no news from him today. Susan included the disclaimer that we are not organizing other seminars

Susan also included a debate/panel discussion ACTION: Susan to include idea of panel in the message

ACTION: Susan to contact Terry and Shirley to move this forward with Jimmy

ACTION: Ewen to follow up with Michael on dates, format of session, presentation

ACTION: Iain / Vish to follow up on content - and perhaps schedule a tentative dry run session

ACTION: Susan and Tezira to tweet/Yammer/blog about the session

ACTION: Ewen and Silvia to help Michael with facilitation

ACTION: Susan to ask CaSt to send invites to all

ACTION: Susan to ask Angela to help with this...

ACTION: Ewen/Susan to bring Angela on board for next meetingACTION: Ewen to touch base with Iain on dates (ISPC)