The ninth Marine CoLAB workshop aims to finalise the timeline and workplan for 2016, discuss the governance structure and identify activities in 2016 and beyond. The day begins with an update from current Marine CoLAB projects and ends with the group consulting on the Chagos and Game on! projects.

Agenda: Marine CoLAB March 2016

March 2016

Outline of the Day

The day started with introduction and setting the context from Louisa and a few quick updates from projects.

We finalised the timeline and workplan for 2016. Aniol shared a compiled version of this in advance and led the session. We populated the wall with a visual template along the 2016 timeline. Activities on post-its, were added and milestones arranged across the rest of 2016.

There was broad agreement that the mission, vision and communications shared by Mirella are finalised and agreed by the group.

We finalised activities and milestones and meetings scheduled for around the themes “We Think” and “We Test.”

We then tackled the themes “We share” and “We Learn” during the Action Learning session, which was lead by Giles.

We also looked at the “How we Plan” governance and structure to identify the activities needed and used the last half hour before lunch to update the timeline and work plan for 2016 and beyond. The final agreed work plan is here.

The afternoon was an inspiring consultation session on the Chagos project. Sophie Maxwell gave us a short introduction and 2 key questions and we split in two groups to brainstorm ideas. Some of these are summarised on the images below.

This lead into the question on how how we measure and evaluate impact across both the Chagos and the Game On projects. We also explored the interconnections between this two potential projects.

For the final part of the afternoon we turned our focus to the MPA/coastal communities project, with an update from Sandy who led the session. We discussed and engaged with the whole group around this project and how to plan 1/2day workshop and next steps.

There was a broader question asked by Sophie on what the participants thought about the successful recipe that brought this group together to be impactful and below are some of the reflections from the group:

“The long term commitment by the Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation, allowed us to build trust, by giving us the time to get to know each other and come together as equals. It is like two pandas meeting in a zoo.” “We were not presented with an initial agenda, but were allowed to spend a lot of time to get to know each other. This was thanks to the foundation providing a stable infrastructure, including venue, funding for our time and facilitation.” “we were freed up from organisational responsibility and brought together also as individuals not feeling that we always had to represent our brands. FoAM’s facilitation was very important.” “Our personalities meshed well together and there was room for laughter, room for fun and that created trust.” “This is an optimistic group with ambition and drive to make anything possible.” “The excellent facilitators and the diversity of organisations was important. There was respect for each others skills and ambition to do more together than our parts” “The open space allowed us to explore what we wanted to know and what we wanted to do, so and we were not pushed for results”