Time line of events

The idea of the time-line is to collect all the events from 2001 to at least June, relating to fire safety and other issues that led to the Island opening late this year. We also intend to fold board and officer terms, key staff positions, and the facilities committee tenures on to this time line.

Obviously, it's going to have a million entries. We intend to structure it so that it is easy to filter for items of interest and to assign "significance levels" to events so that one can see a "high level" overview as well as all the gory detail.

What's linked from this post is the versions of the time-lines that we submitted to the board for their August 28th meeting. The versions are a "major events" version, and a full version of all the events we have on the time line right now. In no way do we think that this is complete, but this version emerged from one of the draft documents we're working on, and it seemed like a good place to start.

We're very eager for input on these time lines, both in terms of their form, and and substantively in terms of what's on them. Please send us feedback at StarIslandOpenedLate@gmail.com. Thanks.

The files are both PDF files hosted at one of our personal web sites.

Time Line Level 1

Time Line All Events

If for some reason you can't get them and you want, them, e-mail me at StarIslandOpenedLate@gmail.com and I'll e-mail them to you.

Committee submission to the Corporation Board

Early on in the life of the committee, Brad Greeley asked what, if any, interim updates the committee could provide to the Board of Trustees. We were reluctant to committ to "interim" findings, but realized that a work plan and time-line of events relevant to the closure would be useful. We agreed to provide these for the Board's August 28th meeting.

Here's what we submitted to the Board as a narrative (slightly edited for clarity); the astute reader will recognize the "organization" piece from our August 7th post Work Plan for the IOL Committee:

The IOL committee has met once by phone and twice in person and has been working via e-mail. Our current approach to understanding why the island opened late examines events and processes from seven points of view:

• Regulatory issues
  
• Budgetary issues
  
• Communications issues with
  • Public
    
  • Staff
    
  • Community
• Board oversight of managers and staff
  
• Facilities committee
  
• Human Relations
  • Management by staff of front-line workers
    
  • Who we manage / how we hire
    
  • Why we need the staff we need
• Culture / "Island Mind" (by which we mean the 200+ year history of difficult relationships between the island and the mainland, and how that must change in the 21st century).
  

We have reviewed the documents provided to us by Amy (both paper and electronic); our not-yet-complete document inventory runs to 195 documents.

Our work is now focusing on the personal interviews needed to round out the picture provided by the documents. Our decision to interview specific people is driven by three factors: can they provide information about the process that was not in the documents; Can we help the future course of events by demonstrating to regulators the serious and dispassionate look we are taking at how to improve our processes; and were people significant actors in the Star Island process such that not interviewing them would make the report seem incomplete. It is very possible we will add people to our interview list, particularly regarding this last criterion.

LOAS I held a “town meeting” regarding their own governance. We were invited to attend but it ended up be scheduled directly in conflict with our second in-person meeting. Brad Greeley, Dave Boynton, and Joe Watts did attend, and our committee sent along an update (largely the same information as is on the blog) that was shared with the meeting. The feedback Jordan got from being on the island later in the week was that the transparency was appreciated. Martha Copithorne is on the island this week and has agreed to take input from anyone interested on the island.

We also submitted a time-line to the board; more about that in the next post.

Second Committee Meeting

The committee met again this evening in Concord, NH. As with the first meeting, the discussion was wide ranging but productive in clarifying issues and continuing to craft our ultimate report. Each of the members of the committee had reviewed all of the paper files we have received and many of the electronic documents. While there may be a little more to do in this regard, we think we have a handle on most of the documents now.

We received and reviewed the seven "thematic" documents we decided upon at our last meeting. Though different by necessity given their themes, each relates to the events over the last five years, and most include a chronology supporting their description of the events.

In essence, we have a good description of the "What". The next piece to be written down would be the "why" part.

We have committed to have a time-line for the Board of Directors by their next meeting, Tuesday, August 28. Jordan will synthesize this from the various "thematic" reports.

We have identified a number of people in the Star Island community with which we wish to talk. We have not scheduled formal "interviews" but several of the committee members felt that learning how these events transpired from the viewpoints of people involved in the process in different ways would be constructive. We expect to have those conversations over the coming days.

The committee is hoping to have a product we can release some time in October. In order to do this we need to have the "Why" portion of our documents completed in early September so that we can spend the balance of the month checking them and integrating all this material into a coherent whole.

Our next meeting will be in Concord on September 10th.

Board Affirms Confidentiality Policy

We requested that the Star Island Corporation Board of Directors affirm our confidentiality policy. We did this because we realized that as "a creature of the board", the board would theoretically have the right to request any documents of the committee. If people give us information in confidence, we would like it to remain in confidence.

We are pleased to report that at their Wednesday, August 8th meeting, the board did affirm the committee's confidentiality policy.

Confidentiality Policy

At it's first meeting, the committee adopted a confidentiality policy. Its purpose is twofold:

• to provide a vehicle for those who wish to submit information that they do not wish attributed to themselves by name to contribute
  
• to covenant with each other that we will respect the committee's process and not release information before we as a group are ready

The committee's confidentiality policy is as follows:

The Star Island Opening Late (IOL) Committee was established by the Star Island Corporation Board of Directors "to review the elements which led to the delayed opening of the 2007 season and recommend any changes to board policy and process or the staff and its process."

To understanding the events and actions that resulted in the delayed opening, we welcome information from all sources and pledge to respect the confidentiality of those individuals who request it. While we may utilize and disseminate information provided in confidence, we will protect the identity of people who provide us that information. The Committee will not accept information submitted by anonymous sources. Signed communications may be sent to the IOL Committee at StarIslandOpenedLate@gmail.com

As individuals, we have pledged not to release information we have collected, except as needed to further our investigations, until the committee as a whole decides to release interim or final documents.

We have asked that the Board of Directors affirm our confidentiality policy, and that it not request from the committee any attribution for information received in confidence.

Work Plan for the IOL Committee:

Following the committee's initial face-to-face work meeting on August 7th, I think I can say the following about what we plan to produce.

We foresee the committee having two primary work products: a chronology of what happened when, and a narrative assessment why things happened as they did. The chronology will be available in draft form for the Corporation's Board of Directors meeting on August 28th. We look forward to having it available for people to comment on and update, as there are many events that led to this year's closure.

The narrative assessment has been tentatively divided into seven themes:

• Regulatory issues
  
• Budgetary issues
  
• Communications issues with
  • Public
    
  • Staff
    
  • Community
• Board oversight of managers and staff
  
• Facilities committee
  
• Human Relations
  • Management by staff of front-line workers
    
  • Who we manage / how we hire
    
  • Why we need the staff we need
• Culture / "Island Mind" (by which we mean the 200+ year history of difficult relationships between the island and the mainland, and how that must change in the 21st century).
  

In addition, we are interested in acquiring as many "vignettes" as possible about what happened to whom when. Our purpose explicitly is not to repeat them or validate them, but to understand what kinds of things people think happened, and understand what that means about how we do communicate and how we need to communicate. In an Island community such as ours where we all share the same space, but not at the same time, there are some very challenging communications issues, and we'd like to use stories to understand them.

Jordan goes to the Island for the staff meeting

Jordan was invited to the Corporation staff meeting on Friday the 3rd to brief the staff on how the committee intends to get its work done and the values the committee intends to try to uphold. An important part of this meeting was to hear the staff's concerns about the committee. A large part of this was trying to allay concerns that didn't seem justified in the light of how the committee wants to operate, and understand concerns that the committee hadn't foreseen and see how those can be addressed.

I basically shared what was in the previous post, as well as describing the people on the committee.

There were many questions and clarifications, some of which resulted in work that I took back to our committee when it met on Tuesday the 7th.

Values Guiding the IOL Committee

As a committee, we have not yet formally adopted a set of guidelines or values for our work. However in all of the conversations that I've been part of around this committee, some things have become clear, and everyone seems to be coming from the same place on them. When people ask, "how are you going to go about this job", these things form the core of the story.

I'm laying them out here because they seem consistent with the teleconference the committee had on Tuesday, and they were in place before I went to the Island on Friday.

First and foremost, this committee is not going to blame anyone for what happened. We're most emphatically not going to get to a statement like "This wouldn't have happened in so-and-so had done such-and-such on this date." My feeling, reflected in our charter, is that this was a systems and process failure, hence our charge to understand how we do what we do, and how that works and does not work for us, rather than to understand who did what when.

Everyone working for Star Island, whether paid staff or volunteer, strongly wants to do the best thing for the Island. There was no failure of good will or "not my job" or people not caring about the outcome. Again, it's how we work together that raises questions.

Both of those things having been said...

It is entirely possible that we will find instances where well-meaning people, doing the best the could, made decisions that led to bad outcomes. Again, I don't think we're on a hunt for such decisions, but it is very possible that we may find them. Our reaction has to be, "How can we help this person make better decisions in the future?" ... whether those means be personnel development, better management, improved business processes, or whatever. We characterized this as the balance between accountability, which is good and constructive, and blame, which we don't see as having any purpose in this context.

The many different "constituencies" that make up the Star Island community, and the relationships among them, are key to understanding how we got here and what we have to do differently in the future. Our community and its governance have evolved over more than a century; decisions and structures that made sense in 1900 didn't necessarily make sense in 1950, and those that made sense in 1950 didn't necessarily make sense in 1985, and those from 1985 similarly don't necessarily fit 2007. Learning to think intentionally about our community and what it is we value about it versus what are just historical vestiges will probably be important in helping us shape the future.

How we communicate among our constituencies is clearly part of the problem. Communicating to all our constituencies - all parts of the Star Island community - what the competing claims and constraints are in running the island is very difficult. People seeing different pictures because they're seeing different parts of the same picture, and therefore drawing different conclusions leads to unnecessary contention. One of our tasks will be to identify how communications figured in to the problem and in to the unfolding events this summer.

Values. Different constituencies value different things about Star Island. Which leads them to different conclusions about Star Island policy issues. One of our tasks will be to understand what these different values and goals are, and how they can interact constructively, rather than dysfunctionally.

Transparency is gonig to be a key task for the committee. Hence this blog. It is important that people feel that the committee is accessible and not secretive about what we're doing.

Copies of documents mailed to committee members

After a great deal of copying and putting in to binders, the documents Amy had given to Jordan were UPS'ed out to the committee members today.