On Think Tanks Exchange Events

The Exchange will bring the participants together in a series of face to face and online events.

Each event event will have broad three objectives:

Enable the interaction between the participants to foster new relationships and collaboration;
Learning about, developing a plan, and implementing a collaborative research project on either a Policy issue or an Organizational Development issue (in teams of two or more); and
Contribute to the action learning aspects of the project, which focus on the barriers to collaboration within and across regions that think tanks face.

As part of The Exchange’s commitment to transparency, all events will be announced and reported on this page. All the materials produced for and shared during the events will also be uploaded here.

The events will be covered by The Exchange (travel, accommodation, etc.) but the host think tanks are expected to provide some basic support and a space to meet. The idea is that we will all meet at the think tanks themselves, so a meeting room, for example, would be ideal.

Meetings

The think tanks selected will participate in a series of 4 face to face meetings and about 6 webinars that will take place between early 2014 and mid-2015. Each face to face meeting will last 4 to 5 days and will be hosted by one of the participating think tanks. This will allow each participant to visit 3 or 4 other think tanks and learn about their work and the context within which this work takes place.

Each meeting will include time for:

Key note presentations on a policy or organisational development issue;
Reflection on the barriers for collaboration faced by think tanks (within and across regions)
Work on the collaborative research projects (during the first year there will be time for planning and trainings and the second year will be focused on working on the projects themselves)
Social and networking opportunities to get to know each other as well as the host organisations

The first meeting took place in Lima, Peru between 25th and 28th March 2014:

The second meeting is now expected to be made up of a series of bilateral (or trilateral) meetings between participants involved in developing the collaborative projects’ proposals.

Communications team meeting in Budapest

Therefore the second meeting – proper- took place in Jakarta between 29th September and 4th October:

Article 33 Indonesia coordinated the organisation of the event with IRE and KSI. This helped to ensure that both organisations participated fully of the event.

As before, we shared the draft workshop outline with the participants and incorporated their comments. The workshop reports can be read here:

The Jakarta meeting provided ample of opportunities to learn about collaboration. Day three was dedicated to this, led by a presentation by Orazio Bellettini at SMERU.

The third meeting took place in April 2015 in Quito, Ecuador:

The fourth and last meeting will take place in Rio, Brazil in September 2015.

Webinars and other collaborations

The webinars may be coordinated by one think tank and The Exchange’s team and its collaborators. They will be shorter, 2 hours more or less, and focus on a key policy or organisational development issue of interest to the participants. The topics to be addressed will respond to the interests of the think tanks themselves but the team will make some recommendations, too.

These webinars will be more practical in nature and include some time to catch-up on progress.

Online discussions as well as working on shared documents could be used to encourage engagement between team members and between the participants as a while. The topics, in all cases, may be of interest to all or to some of the participants.