Thu, October 29, 2009 10:23:39 PM
From: Linda Whittaker
Email: olsvig2000@yahoo.com
Hi everyone,
Just got back from our EBONE workshop/conference yesterday night. It's good to be home although I had to tidy up a bit - 14 cats without mama can really mess up a house. The guy who takes care of my critters did a good job, but he's not into cleaning.....I've got three loads of laundry even before I get to my clothes....
Ah well, that's the price I pay every time I travel. It was worth the trouble. I had to run this conference and I would have been exhausted traveling back and forth, even though the venue was only 45 km (about 25 miles) from home. Also, somebody had to babysit the Europeans in case of problems. We had few, but one of them was a school group of 130 teenagers and 6 teachers that descended on us. The teachers disappeared at night and the kids raised hell at 1 am; I had to go out and kick ass in Hebrew until they shut up, or at least went into their rooms and closed the doors before resuming the riot. Lost an hour of sleep that way but I guess it kept my inner Attila in practice.
The conference was very successful. Our part of the project has been moving well but few of the others, which were supposed to be supporting and advising us, did much in the first half of the project. So we were like a reconnaissance platoon that gets way out behind enemy lines with a real danger of losing connection with the regular troops. We had to get those links going. I pushed here, pulled there, and seem to have activated some real cooperation with key European partners on the bits we really need. Most of them, anyway. One module, supposed to determine which species diversity measures we actually test, has been dead as a doornail, and we really needed to decide on that. So at the end, with whiteboard and marker, I spent an hour with our whole bunch hammering out what we should test, and how.
The Europeans tend to stick to plan. Israelis tend to improvise the minute they see the plan isn't working. I operate like an Israeli in this. So they were kinda shocked when I said "Okay, WP1 is dead for the moment, and we have to make some decisions. Yallah, let's roll." Once they got past the surprise, they kicked into it, and we figured out a game plan fairly easily. In fact, making game plans was what this meeting was all about. I told them from the start that at the end of the meeting I wanted to walk away with a workplan for our module for 2010, and we got that. Took some teeth pulling, but we got a remote sensing ad hoc team rolling with a set of clear tasks; likewise some specific testing on biodiversity indicators. Habitat mapping was cooking along okay, but we had to connect with it.
It's funny. I'm awkward and nerdy in most circumstances, until I see problems to be solved, but my mind seems to click into gear when faced with a mess. It's like playing chess or some other war game. I can figure out the resources needed, get them, find the troops, deploy them, and set it rolling. Some folks are astonished because of this Clark Kent/Superman transformation I keep doing, but my boss is used to it, and grins when Machiavelli kicks into gear. The Europeans weren't, however. After the session, half a dozen of them took photographs of the sketches on the whiteboard. Gee. It's a gift for strategic thinking. I don't question it any more, always had it.
After 18 months, I also can pretty well figure where to throw in my own troops. My boss, Eliezer, is the walking library, knowing better than any of the others what is going on in the literature and the international agreements, and what it means. He's my data resource. His boss, Shkedy, is the synthesist. His skills are similar to mine; he can pull the most relevant bits from a messy situation and put his finger on the key problems. He expresses himself well and can push to get things done better than I can, working with people. However, he has a poor sense of what people are best for what purpose and tends to butt heads. So he supplements rather than replaces my work, and I will depend on him to implement what we decide to do. Our remote sensing person is a meticulous technician. Tell her what to do and she does a great job, but if left to figure it out for herself, she gets stuck since all details are of equal importance to her. Our point man in the field is a woman who would far rather be out doing surveys than in the office, and she works well with people. So together we have quite a good set of skills; the challenge is to get the right person in the right place at the right time. At this meeting, we did it.
Sure was exhausting, thought. I slept nine hours when I got home. Today I'm taking a few of the Europeans to the Old City to see the sights. We have bad weather, which is maybe good. It is Friday and the Old City of Jerusalem can be packed on a good day, with Moslems going to pray at the Al Aksa Mosque and Jews at the Western Wall. It is interesting but can also be a flash point. However, in my memory nobody ever started a riot in a rainstorm. It's the good weather when you have to be careful.
After that, sort myself out, let my head digest what passed and get it written down. And then prepare for the next round, our annual meeting in Thessaloniki, Greece, in ten days. I will have to digest and present the results of our workshop, and basically tell the whole project, hey wake up. Yallah, we have work to do.....
shabbat shalom,
Linda
~Pixs Googled ~PSL
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://shabbat-shalom-jerusalem.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment