MEMORANDUM
To: Roundtable on Sustainable Forests
From: Tim Mealey, Sarah Walen, and Shawn
Walker
Subject: Update on Roundtable Activities
Date: June 11, 1999
This memorandum is intended to provide you with an
update and announcement relating to a number of activities of the Roundtable on
Sustainable Forests. This memo is being
sent to you via fax, direct email, and through the webconference we have
established for the Roundtable. We
apologize in advance to those of you think receiving three copies of the same
memo is a bit excessive. But we hope
you understand our reasons for doing so after you read this memo.
A belated thanks to those of you who were able to join us at
the 5/19/99 meeting. We feel you
accomplished a great deal at the meeting, particularly as a result of the work
done by the Technical Work Group (TWG) and the Communications and Outreach Work
Group (COWG). For those of you who were unable to attend the meeting, attached to this
memo please fnd a brief summary of the discussions that took place at the
meeting. We are in the process of
producing a more thorough summary which we will share with you in the near
future.
Based
on conversations we have had many of you, we have concluded that there is an
urgent need to get more people involved in making sure there is a clear
understanding of the basic funding needs, and to participate in establishing a
secure funding base, for completing the breadth and variety of tasks the
Roundtable has taken upon itself. We
refer here to this subject as the need to develop a “business plan.”
Bill
Banzhaf of the Society of American Foresters has agreed to serve as host of a
meeting to discuss and agree upon the major components of a business plan for
the Roundtable and to strategize on how the major components of this plan can
be funded at a level that will ensure the continued success of the Roundtable
process. We hope to accomplish these
objectives in a three-hour meeting that will be held sometime on Tuesday, June
22, or Wednesday, June 23. In the next
few days, we will be trying to recruit the participation of Roundtable members
whom we believe will be critical to success of the objectives for this
meeting. However, in the spirit of
inclusiveness and transparency, we would like to hereby invite any Roundtable
member who wishes to, to join us at this meeting. We plan to set the precise time and date for this meeting by no
later than Wednesday, June 16 close of busineess. Please use the attached response form to indicate your desire to
participate in this meeting, your availability on the dates we have identified,
and/or your desire to participate in any further discussions of the
Roundtable’s business plan.
Since
a good portion of the Roundtable’ business plan will address the need for
continued facilitation and logistical support, we plan to take the lead in
preparing a draft of the portions of the plan that will address these
particular needs, as well as the proposed need for a Roundtable website. Thus, we will develop a description of the
needs, services to be provided to address these needs, and costs estimates for
continued facilitation and logistical support of: a) the Roundtable; b) the TWG
and Criteria Technical Committees (CTCs) that the TWG will be forming; c) the
Technical Workshops; d) the COWG; and e) the Roundtable Website. We plan to present a draft of these portions
of the business plan at this meeting.
We remain open to any input from Roundtable participants on these
portions of the plan. We also encourage
Roundtable members to identify and prepare any other portions of the business
plan that will not be covered by the five components that we will focus upon.
Finally,
we are hopeful that key Roundtable members can make commitments at this meeting
or soon thereafter to either fund portions of the plan or commit to help
raising funds that can be used to support various portions of the plan.
As
we mentioned at the 5/19/99 meeting, we are attempting to shift into a mode of
communication within the Roundtable that relies very heavily on electronic mail
and, in particular, on the use of the “webconferences” we have now established
for the Roundtable and for each of the Roundtable’s two work groups. As per your decision at the May 19 meeting,
we have given all Rountable members the ability to participate in all three of
the conferences. (We would only request
that those of you who are not members of the TWG or COWG participate in the
webconferences for those two work groups on a “read only basis.” Given the inclusive and transparent goals of
the Roundtable, you of course should feel free to join in any dialogue or the
completion of any tasks the work groups are focusing upon, but be careful what
you ask for because it may result in you being asked to join the work group.)
It
has come to our attention, however, that it will require a bit more effort on
all of our parts to complete this transition.
Attached please find a detailed set of instructions for logging on to
Meridian’s “Web Board” which contains the Roundtable “webconferences” and for
selecting one of the two possible options for receiving email posted to the
conferences (i.e., either direct receipt of all email posted to the conference
or receipt of an email notice that email has been posted to the
conference). Since we have launched the
webconferences, we have learned that even if you successfully log on to the
conference, if you do not also successfully select and save one of the two
options for how to receive email that is posted to the conference, the default
is that you will not receive any email or notices that email has been posted. Thus, if you have previously logged on to
the Roundtable webconference and you have not received a copy of this
particular message from the “listmanager” for the Roundtable webconference,
this means you need to go back to the webconference and reselect one of the two
options. You of course can rely on the
default of going to the webconference to review all messages, but this may
cause you to miss any time senstive information.
At
your may 19, 1999 meeting, you decided that the next Roundtable meeting would
take place in late August or early September 1999 at a location to be announced
in Washington, D.C. They also agreed to
hold a high level meeting on Roundtable progress in January 2000 involving the
agency heads and others that attended the 7/14/99 Roundtable meeting. Based on the revised timeline being
developed by the TWG, we believe it may be necessary to revisit this
schedule. We realize the need to set
dates for meetings as far in advance as possible, especially if we still plan
to conduct a Roundtable meeting in late August or September. We will be communicating with you in the
very near future about the dates for future Roundtable meetings.
In
the meantime, the TWG and COWG are busy working on completing a variety of
tasks. The TWG is focusing upon
establishing the Criteria Technical Committees (CTCs) that will help to form
the agenda prepare for the Technical Workshops. They will soon be communicating with the entire Roundtable to
solicit your input on the makeup of the CTCs.
The next meeting of the TWG will take place INSERT. The COWG is busy crafting a Question and
Answer document, key generic messages, and the design of the Roundtable’s
website. Its next meeting will take
place on July 6 in Washington, D.C. If
you wish to join either one of both of these work groups, please contact Shawn
Walker at 202-452-1590 or by email at <shawnwalker@merid.org>.
Attachments:
Preliminary
Summary of May 19, 1999 Meeting
Response
Form for Business Plan Development Meeting
Instructions
for Logging on Selecting Email Options for the Roundtable Webconferences
Discussion
at the 5/19/99 meeting focused on the progress of TWG and the COWG since the
2/24/99 Roundtable meeting. Before the
group turned to these items, Phil Janik, U.S. Forest Service (USFS), announced
a major initiative of the USFS, which will be headed by Jim Sedel, Cross Deputy
Coordinator on Water. This initiative
will focus on water quality, quantity and distribution issues as a key issue
over the next decade. The initiative
will focus on how the USFS can do a better job investing its resources to
address these issues. He stated that he
believed this initiative may have some connection to the Roundtable and asked
the group to whether they wanted to learn more about it at the next Roundtable
meeting. Roundtable participants
expressed an interest in hearing more about this initiative.
The
Roundtable also heard a report from Paul Geissler on the TWG Draft Action Plan
that was based on the former Framework for the TWG. It included additional information on the Roundtable goals as
understood by the TWG, the identification of six tasks to be performed by the
Work Group, and the technical workshops.
The TWG proposed a series of three to four workshops to work towards
achieving the goals of the Roundtable, while simultaneously addressing the six
tasks to be completed by the TWG. The
TWG also proposed that Technical Committees be formed for each of the seven
criteria and one to address the crosscutting issues. These Citeria Technical Committees (CTCs) will help to develop
the agenda and prepare for the workshops, as well as complete any follow-up to
the applicable workshops.
In
their discussion of the Draft Action Plan, Roundtable participants commented on
the TWG's understanding of the Roundtable goals and propose some ideas to
clarify the intent of the first goal and to draw a more explicit connection
with the overarching goal of sustainable forest management. Roundtable members also commented on
participation in the CTCs and the workshops, and stressed the importance of
involving more than federal agencies, including representatives of
non-governmental organizations, the environmental community, and industry. Roundtable participants endorsed the Draft
Action Plan and supported the TWG in its efforts to prepare for the upcoming
workshops. The COWG agreed to help the
TWG with related communication needs in preparation for and subsequent to the
workshops.
Roundtable
participants also heard a brief report from Robert Hendricks, USFS, on a
potential opportunity for the Roundtable to contribute to the Montreal Process
Technical Advisory Committee (MPTAC) meeting on 11/29 through 12/3/99 in
Charleston, South Carolina. They
learned about a meeting of a smaller group of individuals the week of 5/24/99
in Uruguay for the purpose of reviewing a series of technical papers on C&I
that will form the basis of discussion at the MPTAC meeting. The group was asked to consider whether and
how the Roundtable might contribute at the MPTAC meeting. Roundtable participants were very interested
in the opportunity to meet with the MPTAC.
They considered different ways to participate in the MPTAC meeting and
decided that the best approach would be to secure a spot on the agenda for the
meeting and send a small panel (3 or 4 individuals) of representatives from the
Roundtable to make a presentation on the Roundtable efforts. Other Roundtable participants might attend
the meeting as observers.
The
group received an update on a "Satellite" Stakeholder Meeting on
C&I for Sustainable Rangeland from Joel Holtrop, USFS. The meeting was held on 4/27- 28/99 and was
attended by federal agencies, academia, environmentalists, and several
rangeland societies. The purpose of the
meeting was to scope out the level of interest in establishing C&I for
rangelands. Stakeholders supported the
use of C&I as a framework for sustainability and formed several work groups
to follow-up on the interest expressed at the meeting. Roundtable participants were supportive of
the effort. They discussed how this
initiative and other similar efforts might ultimately fit into a broader
context of sustainability indicators.
The
Roundtable heard a status report on the activities of the COWG from Bill
Banzhaf, Society of American Foresters, and Ruth McWilliams, USFS. The COWG clarified and expanded the list of
target audiences for the Roundtable process.
They took advantage of an opportunity to communicate about the
Roundtable at the National Town Meeting (NTM) of the President's Council on
Sustainable Development, which they hope can provide the basis for
"generic" messages regarding C&I and the Roundtable process. The COWG plans to seek additional
opportunities for outreach including the Annual Meeting of the National
Association of Communities on 7/16 - 20, 1999, the Society of American
Foresters (SAF) Annual Convention sometime around 9/13/99, and other
possibilities through the National Governors Association. COWG participants also called attention to
the Roundtable and Work Group "webconferences" to facilitate internal
Roundtable communication, and urged Roundtable participants to use the
conferences. They hoped the website for
the Roundtable might be up and running by mid-June 1999. In preparation for external communication,
The COWG also drafted a preliminary list of resource documents related to the
Roundtable process for internal use that will later be modified to serve as a
basis for background documents for the external audiences. The next steps for the COWG include continue developing the
"generic" Roundtable messages in preparation for external
communication and proceeding with plans for the website.
Roundtable
participants were supportive of COWG progress and agreed with the proposed next
steps. As they discussed the COWG
presentation and plans to develop the "generic" messages, the
questions of whether, how and when to involve other Roundtable members in the Work
Group process were raised. It was
clarified that the process is open and that any Roundtable member is welcome to
provide comments on materials like the "generic" messages as long as
they honor the need for Work Groups to progress with their tasks and are
willing to operate within established timeframes. Roundtable agreed that permission to participate in the
webconference for both the TWG and COWG should be expanded to all Roundtable
members. Bill Mankin of the Global Forest Policy Project expressed his desire
to become a member of the COWG, expressing particular interest in working on
the "generic" messages.
Roundtable members expressed interest in seeing the materials used for
the poster at the NTM, and Meridian will work with Ruth McWilliams to post
these materials to the webconference.
The
meeting closed with a discussion on next steps for the Work Groups and the
Roundtable. The next steps and the
timeframes agreed upon by the group are summarized below by month.
(Please note: The schedule
presented below was the schedule discussed and tentatively agreed upon at the
5/19/99 Roundtable meeting. A revised
schedule will soon be proposed by the TWG and COWG as a result of discussions
that took place at their joint meeting held on June 10, 1999. The proposed revisions to the schedule for
the activities described below will be shared with the Roundtable in the very
near future.)
JUNE
á
TWG
begins to form the Criteria and Crosscutting Issues Technical Committees.
á
The
Roundtable Website is established.
á
TWG
formalizes the Criteria and Crosscutting Issues Technical Committees and works
with them to begin to prepare for the technical workshops.
á
The
COWG continues to develop generic messages and refine the Charter for the
Roundtable.
á
6/10/99
the COWG and the TWG hold individual Work Group and joint meetings.
JULY
á
TWG
continues to work with the Criteria and Crosscutting Issues Technical
Committees to prepare for the technical workshops. Materials for the workshops will be completed and workshop
participants will be identified.
á
The
Roundtable will prepare and issue a one-year progress report on the Roundtable
to share with the Agency heads and others who were prominent at the 7/14/98
Roundtable meeting. The report may
include information about the Website, technical workshops, the high level
meeting in January, and the long-term goals of the Roundtable.
AUGUST
á
TWG
and Technical Committees issue invitations to the technical workshops along
with meeting materials and assignments in preparation for the workshops. Workshop participants prepare for the
workshops.
SEPTEMBER
á
Hold
two of three technical workshops.
á
Next
Roundtable meeting at which the group may receive a briefing on the USFS water
initiative, an update from the TWG on the workshops, an update from the COWG on
outreach activities, and plan for the MPTAC meeting in on 11/29-12/3/99.
OCTOBER
á
Hold
the third of three technical workshops.
NOVEMBER
á
TWG
and Technical Committees develop a report summarizing the results of the
findings from the technical workshops.
DECEMBER
á
TWG
issues a draft report on the technical workshops to the Roundtable for review
and comment.
JANUARY
á
High
level meeting on the Roundtable takes place.