Hi John, thanks for reporting on some of the progress we have made in SLENZ, it is good to get an outsiders view, even if it is perplexing. Unfortunately we can’t reference the Google Group or the GoogleDocs because they are closed and inaccessible to people not in the project. Funny that.. tax payers project it is and all. But your blog, my blog and Sarah’s blog is accessible, and so your reporting has verifiable references at last. I’m not sure I follow your opinion that we have a proliferation of channels. Your blog has been quite central, and the more you report on the project, the more central it becomes. In a single post you have brought together all significant work from the last week. Where else do we have such a collation? We have an incredible number of GoogleDocs I have lost track of which ones are active and which ones aren’t getting worked on anymore. I have a terrible feeling that the GoogleGroup emails are not getting read by everyone all the time (speaking for myself, it is very hard to keep track on SLENZ emails while I’m in the head space of clearing out 100s of general work email. Setting aside time to read your blog and others is much more focused. As for “grandstanding” and “widening scope”, I’m sorry you see it that way. From where I sit, we are totally in line with the exact same things we discussed at the face to face meeting. Unfortunately our efforts of recording and documenting those discussion were not successful and we all are left with different ideas of what actually took place there.
But as Terry and other makes pains to point out. This project is to determine a good process amongst other things. So we have some good things to report on in terms of that particular outcome. Thanks to your blog, we have a central place that points to at least some of that progress.
Thanks for your remarks. I realise some of the googledocs are not available but believe those that aren’t will be made available in the near future. Although you do not accept there is a proliferation of channels your difficulty keeping up with googledocs or the googlegroups e-mail channel, and other people’s difficulty keeping up with the succession of blogs etc would suggest to me that it would be better to have one organised channel that everyone uses for project activities. That said, I believe the issue is being worked on and that SLENZ has recorded some remarkable achievements in its short history, some even sparked by what I referred to as “grandstanding”. However, i do know that some members of the team have felt slightly frustrated by what they see as delays in getting into action as it were.
If SLENZ can come up with an answer to the communication problem I think it will have provided added value to the project for all VW educators.