University Challenge Workshop Meeting Minutes

From Common Energy UVic

Meeting Minutes of the Business and the Economy Working Group's University Challenge Meeting for July 19, 2007.

Present: Jill Doucette, Emily Keller, Jamie Biggar, Heather McKenzie, Matt Greeno, Mark Chandler, Naomi Devine, Caitlin Meggs, Joe Melton, Brandy Sistilli

Meeting Start Time: 6:45 pm

[edit] Key Objectives

1) Plan how the project will be organized on campus between and within departments)

• Jill presents the outline for the UC document
• Explains Phase 1 (direct and within their institutional boundary; can take place over any amount of time depending on time and funding capacity) and 2 (indirect) and Milestone Framework
  • do we want the phases to be linear or concurrently?
  • what exactly are we equipping the departments with - e.g. we provide them with the 'resources and tools'
  • facilitating that the faculties/depts that jioin on to be able to point them towards a few intial resources, but then have them add new/additional and more specific resources to their department (eg Chem lab);
  • How to do this? Should we create a wiki for it? Could the knowledge page work? (using this might create a technological barrier - learning to use the wiki software);
  • Naomi - utilizing the knowledge base is important - having everyone contribute to the same space;
  • Jamie: 1) Capacity to train the Champions and then train the champions to train others (Matt will look into a website he knows of 'training trainers' - also the Learning/Education centre - or does it make more sense to train our own people and they would train others; 2) We will need to have some sort of centralized capacity to respond to questions and someone to contact - makes sense to have a hub that they funnel info to and then that person puts it on the website; 3)Importance of having people from the various teams to meet in person (not exclusively interacting on the wiki) to share ideas and resources;
  • 'Champion Teams' - how do we communicate these?;
  • people will likely want to learn together as a group; what sort of actions are best for us; how do we engage people; what are reasonable targets to set; we will probably be asked to provide a lot of guidance;
  • database that has the purpose of analysing aspects/actions that worked within different departments/centres/organizations with regard to establishing and equiping an action team;

• • Within a faculty, one barrier of people getting champions/team together - do not often have a lot of time to put into something like this - is there any way that we can have this team be part of their work time? eg be paid for working on it;
  • Jamie - we will not be able to get a prof to be paid for this, but we may be able to have a prof relieved of other duties (eg being on x amount of committees); with staff it may be more difficult. will not likely be able to get an external source of funding to pay for this. And perhaps some small stipend for students;
  • Jill anticipates the profs/staff acting more as a consultative/advisory role, and students doing the majority of the work;
  • Jamie - facilitate student champions speaking with other student champions
  • Joe - staff and faculty have such little time to spare, they will not have time - in order for this to be successful - success will hinge on this being very easy an d straighforward - eg have the spreadsheets formatted already - make it as little time as possible and very streamlined;
  • Business may be an exception because they are already motivated - we need to be careful not to burn out the business school
  • Jamie - 1) September have Business school as pilot - in January have others start to come on; 2) If there is a lot of work right at the beginning, it will scare people off and burn them out - and inventory would do this
  • Naomi - could CE do the inventory to provide buildings with it - to avoid overloading facilities management
  • Jill - one of appendices will be inventory
  • Spreadsheets for calculating - Naomi is good at this
  • what about issues that are controlled centrally - eg paper purchasing? does it make sense to have each individual team take it on? **While doing the more 'boring' inventory work, give them a few tangible, visible wins to carry out right away
  • could we have an inventory of improvements - could we just start from where we are - for example, inventory improvements - weigh waste and then measure improvements
  • Jamie - two categories of action: 1) percentage reductions off of a baseline, or where the act of measuring itself helps to change behaviour; but there are also 2) areas that are almost impossible to measure and hard to break down into a per unit basis in a building
  • Naomi - need to get baseline info for areas where it is important to measure, and also where it is easy to get it - combine this with an inventory of success.
  • baselines change frequently - and turn-over of people
  • which ones do we need baseline for?
  • if we don't have this baseline, and we are trying to get to climate neutral, how do we know how much we need to reduce?
  • Jamie: we could say that it is not until year three that you will have a good idea of your baseline; that will give time to gather inventory
  • Joe - get them going on actions at beginning and have them achieve successes - start data compilation/inventory as they are doing the other milestones.
  • Joe - this could be a habit forming phase - you get into habit of recording and keeping track of things - e.g. how they get to work, how far they fly
  • will need to be very explicit about the logic behind choosing not to have a quantitative baseline
  • data compilation will also start to point out where improvements can be made
  • makes sense to have some experience with implementation before they get into setting goals so that they know what is feasible;
  • need complete buy-in from everyone in faculty - eg if not, what if someone refuses to record their mode of commute?
  • BCN - qualitative - measured through proxies

• Milestones and phases - linear or parallel?
  • linearity is simple - but it may not work in this situation;
  • you may have the school completing actions that are 'BCN' before we have actually achieve CN;
  • will probably not end up being linear - university dynamics do not really work this way;
  • flexibility - balance between too much structure and making it simple enough;

• Can we still use this structure if we chose two parallel tracks for phase 1 and 2?
  • maybe it is more like a checklist - eventually you have all the Milestones reached (some will naturally have to come before others) could recommend what order we think they could be completed in;
  • 'phase' language will have to be changed;

• • do we merge or keep the phases separate? How to separate in the document?

• • Milestone 7 - change it to planning for the second 'phase'/cycle
  • yearly cycle; show them in two 'Streams': 1) quantifiable, measurable, tangible reductions; 2) qualitative contributions to solutions - eg beyond effect;
  • BCN is fuzzy goal - need to strive for vision of continual improvement, rather than stopping abruptly once they have completed challenge
  • two streams

• How should document be
• circular visual to give
• Aran - spiral - engaging, enabling to do, enforcing.

2) Organize and Refine document layout and framework

3) How Social Marketing should fit as a strategy of the University Challenge Matt - referring to something more than the practical logistics of the program - eg. actions they can choose and have social marketing be one of the 'actions' they could choose to use or not. It is one way that you can try to get people to change their behaviour; Jill - Social Marketing could be in an appendix