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.