Following is a summary of ideas that came out of last weeks brainstorm on what we can do to strengthen our team and make ISIS more effective:

a. How can we strengthen the ISIS team?
- Develop/establish new, younger members
- Define roles in the organization
- Outreach to other student groups…ensure that every organization is an advocate for the ISIS project
- Increase Communication within ISIS (increases small group meetings, use of blog)
- Establish a better institutional memory of contacts, processes, etc.
- Raise profile of ISIS group

-More project-focused teams (ie. consulting-style org)
-Seek feedback on what’s broken with the current system (focus on improvement as opposed to adding new features)
-Better branding to student population (differentiation between E@S and ISIS, etc)

- More structure to the organization
- go to house meetings
- Combine Energies (have people focus on their existing passions)
- Kudos portion of meeting
- how does everyone fit in
- emphasize follow-through/commitment
- mentoring

- Make the Blog more about communication, not just information
- more defined milestones/goals for the team
- make annotated contact list
- need to keep people in touch with our direction

- Develop ISIS Labs
- Host and Emerging Technologies Dinner
- Video/Audio Recording of all meetings
- More Formal structure to team meetings
- Organization Archive
- Some deliverable that we can construct (Manifestation of our forward thinking, a vision piece)

(separate) We need a defined description of what ISIS does–when someone on the street asks you “what’s ISIS?”, how do we respond? (hint: not “we do screens”)

b. How can we foster a culture of creativity and innovation?
- Retreats (longer than meetings and geographically/situationally disparate)
- More & better input from student groups (how do we make sure that what we’re doing is the _right_ thing to be doing)

- more blue sky brainstorms (art of innovation style) without constraints
- open, encouraging mindset
- lots of whitespace (virtual and physical)
- good physical meeting space
- make space as available and as fluid as possible
- spirit of intellectual honesty
- don’t be afraid to present ideas and don’t be afraid to challenge them
- strong leadership

c. How can we build it to last?
-Creating and perpetuating loose but formalized organizational structure; mission, purpose, objectives, goals (the key is to formalize it enough without creating a bureacracy that turns people away)
-Records & archives of past thoughts, experiments, what worked and didn’t, etc.
-Cultivating younger team members
-Continual succession planning for people in leadership roles