As part of the Marine CoLAB series, the goal for this workshop was set out the activities and outcomes for 2016 and to continue discussing how to organise beyond 2016, in order for the collaboration to continue and effectively communicate the Value of the Oceans and Marine CoLab issues. The group was updated on the running Marine CoLAB projects and a new 'consulting' hour has been established to support individuals with their Marine CoLAB-related projects.

Facilitated and documented by Vali Lalioti.

Agenda: Marine CoLAB February 2016

Photos on Flickr

The workshop started with a introduction from Louisa and a reminder of our Mission and Vision to set the context for the day, that was to focus on the work plan for 2016 and the Action Learning Cycle of the Marine CoLAB.

The Work plan 2016, was introduced by Aniol and we worked in a group format to identify Outcomes, along the dimensions of infrastructure, where the consensus was to take the Mission and Vision and create a communication narrative to engage the Marine CoLAB organisations and to communicate internally and externally. Mirella is preparing an A4 Communications narrative for the next workshop.

The group used the “bucket” metaphor to structure along the dimension of actual work in 4 groups: We Think, We Test, We Learn, We Share and created associated each with the Values that the Marine CoLAB brings through these 4 distinct activities.

The need to Measure and Evaluate these streams was acknowledged and captured within this session too. This will be worked out into an initial timeline by Aniol for the March workshop.

The afternoon started with a session on the activities of the Action Learning cycle of the Marine CoLAB along two themes: “How we Plan” and “How we Learn”. Participants split into two groups and worked on some of the key questions that surfaced during the previous workshop. The groups took turns to work on both themes, enhancing and building upon the work of the previous group. This created a lot of consensus on a common path that the Marine CoLAB as a group on how to plan and structure and how to learn and evaluate for 2016 and beyond. These were presented back to the group by each subgroup.

We introduced the concept of a consulting hour or “surgery session” and we took Sue’s project of Capturing the value of the Coast to explore how the Marine CoLAB could act as consultants and advisors for each other and each others’ projects. This created very useful links inputs and solutions to some of Sue’s questions. The group decided that this is a fruitful way of bringing in projects and add value as Marine CoLAB back to their organisations. A similar and more expanded version of this will also take place in the afternoon of the next workshop, around two projects: Chagos and GameOn enabling cross-fertilisation between one of the organisation’s projects and one of the MarineCoLAB projects.

The day finished with updates from the Plastics project and the breakfast club. The breakfast club was a meeting between some of the Marine CoLAB members and Marine Conservation and it there is a potential project that the Marine CoLAB would potentially take as a live project later in 2016. Overall, participants thought that this is a good way to bring in external people and also to cross-fertilise between projects.

Participants were then joined by speakers Ollie Hilberry, Director of the MEAM (Making Every Adult Matter) coalition and Kellie Payne, Campaign to End Loneliness, who presented the history and governance structure of their coalitions and lessons learned, opening up to questions and discussion which continued during dinner.