We have a fun lunch as part of the Berkman speaker series today: Karen Coppock, Urs Gasser, and Nimrod Koslovski, each of whom participated in the OII’s summer programme, are presenting on their OII experience.  Some of the key strengths: diversity of participants (geographically and in terms of subject matter); and Victoria Nash and other staff and faculty, they say (and I concur) were terrific.  They also had a series of ideas for how to iterate on this year’s format for next year.  How do you bring together such a multi-disciplinary group together, Nimrod asks, especially in such a dynamic field?  Using more case studies around a policy question could be effective as a way of bringing multiple forms of expertise to bear.

Geoffrey Kirkman had a great point: how do you go from multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary?  Maybe you have both plenary and break-outs that allow for different forms of connect-points between participants. 

Michael Best picked up on his experience in a summer eight years ago at the Santa Fe Institute (which, he said, might have even been antidisciplinary).  He suggests possibly finding ways for individual students to collaborate on specific projects, like a journal article (similar to what Urs is doing with Kaye Trammell, through this programme), and creating a means of healthy competition among participants to “get something done.”

“How you survive the doctoral experience?,” perhaps with a psychologist or someone with skills of that sort, sounded like it would be a useful and popular session.

One very practical idea coming out of OII: pulling together a monthly working series at ISP at Yale and the Berkman Center focused on research in progress.