Reading and working with the Briefs:
Part I

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    • Team work

    This page is still in draft form and preently being critiqued by the Briefs team. Thanks for your understanding.

    Bearing in mind that as a quarterly, the Briefs constitute an exercise that takes place only one time every three months, and that the reading of the basic document is intended to take place in not much more than an your time -- more of course for those who choose to take advantage of the very considerable number of leads and extensions that the Briefs and this site provide, but that is a matter of personal choice. Here for the record is a pattern of use that we have observed in one recent project in a medium sized city which seemed to work very well for them. You will of course have your own.

    After that initial first private read, the mayor or city leader sets up a small informal study and comment group, bringing together a certain number of staff or collaborators whose work involves the following:

    • Environment
    • Public Health
    • City Planning/land use
    • Finance
    • Transport, and
    • The mayor's smartest personal assistant

    For a variety of reasons, the group should not be allowed to expand beyond this upper limit of a big handful; that can come at a later time when and if the project udner condsdiratoi passes this first round of test.

    It is our view that it is important that this core group not be lead by the transport specialist, since the Briefs take a much broader approach to the issues than has traditionally be that of the transport sector. We see the transport guy as a vital part of the mayor's team on this, and certainly one whose technical competence is going to become for most eventual follow up projects of the greatest importance. But this first scan for new ideas for the city is an example of the politics of transportation -- not the technical aspects per se.

    We also recommend that the group participants spend at least an hour, possibly more as their interest and ability to work with the net permit, working directly with the web site and its extensions. The Thinking Exercises and a scan of the Idea Factories would possibly be a good start. More extensive reading and consultation can take place later.

    Agenda

    The goal of this first session being to see to what extent the group can consider the proposed policy and start to address the following questions.

    1. Is it your view that the topic of this Brief might be something that we should be looking into more closely in our city?
    2. Does it correspond with our needs and our possibilities to make it succeed?
    3. Does it faithfully comply with the authors' claims that it can help us achieve significant, notable percentage improvements within this electoral cycle (or less)?
    4. Do we have the technical and financial capacities to make it work - or is this going to be a big deal for which we are going to have to go outside to seek additional funding and support?
    5. Does this specific measure or project, bring up some broader questions about our city that we need to be asking? And if so what are these? And indeed are we able and do we want to get into this part of the challenge as well?
    6. And if our views in terms of most of the above are generally favorable, what do we do now?

      (Incidenatlly, we recommend strongly that the mayor and members of the team talk over these ideas with their partners and fmaililes, and also invite them to have a look at what is on the site so that they can give theri feedback and ideas. One of the major fialures and weaknesses of policy in the sector in the past is that it has al too often been hammered out in close dtecnial sessions -- when of course th issues are very broad ones and concern not just the experts but the full range of the people who live, work and are grwoing up in your community. And so one excellent palce to open up the disaucssins is in yor own homes.

      Next steps

      And if it passes this first test, several courses of action come to mind. Among these:

    7. Creating a small and probably still quite informal secretariat whose task it will be to spend some time with the various key references and recommended sources of further information to see if it will be possible to create a quick preliminary work package to move this idea a next step closer to decision.
    8. Contact the Briefs team using the Hotline service in order to discuss with them questions that have come up.
    9. Through them begin to develop a short list of individuals and groups - hopefully as many in the local area as possible - who can help bring this idea along.
    10. Once enough confidence in the possibility usefulness of this policy in our community is developed and a position of the political leadership starts to be shaped up, it will possibly be time to begin some of the first local outreach sessions to test further this recommendation.

      All of this will be an old story to you, Mayor, since this is the sort of thing that you doubtless do every time a new project or policy comes up for consideration. What is perhaps most interesting in this case, is that some of the measure put forth by the Briefs are going to be quite unfamiliar to many people in your city, so the logic of the proposal needs to be worked out carefully before going to market with it. But that of course you know, and so we can here simply turn over the floor to you so that you can have a look and make up your mind for yourself.

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