Day four of #TheExchangeJakarta

SERIES News and Announcements

The last proper working day of The Exchange meeting in Jakarta was focused on the projects. Each team ‘retreated’ to a breakout room and worked on their projects. By the end, the performance team developed a new version of the project proposal (a project design), the communications team tested their mapping tool, and we developed a new concept note for a third project on business models.

The communications team:

  1. Carried out a mapping of the work that each member does in their think tanks. This helped them to agree on terms and concepts that they had been having trouble with. Depending on the issues each of them worked on and the size and structure of their organisations, communications activities could mean different things to each one.
  2. This helped address and define some terms. This was a difficult challenge to address but learning about each other helped.
  3. And choose the criteria to help identify the most appropriate case studies.
  4. Chose the policy issues that each will work on. They are different but all can be described as ‘sensitive’ issues in their political context.

The performance team:

  1. They identified 4 dimensions to study: Knowledge management, strategic direction (instead of vision and mission), quality assurance, and governance.
  2. They developed a format for the case studies
  3. Defined the research approaches to use: primary and secondary data collection, and interviews and focus groups.
  4. They also revised the proposal and action plan
  5. And they worked on a blog to publish on The Exchange’s website.

The business model team:

  1. Developed a concept note to be reviewed by the organisers and turned into a proposal and
  2. Produced a schedule for the project

What next?

We agreed to organise a third meeting around March/April 2015. This would give the teams enough time to progress and have something to share by the time of the event. The location of the event has not been defined and it was suggested that the participants could choose this themselves.

The organisers will facilitate this process.

The participants suggested that the next event should start with an opportunity to catch-up with each other and in their own teams, include an event like the one organised in SMERU to ‘break’ the week in half and provide a useful distraction, have the meeting close to the hotel, and leave the city tour until the end of the week.