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Membership of the Communication Service Team
:
Emily Ranken, CST Leader
Claudia Mickelson, CST
Niamh Kelly
Abigail Hine
Justin Adams
Steven Lanou
Hao Nguyen
Paula Duffy
Hans Richter
Marilyn Hallock
Communication Service Team Meeting
2/18/09
1. Earth Day – Earth day at MIT is April 23. The
theme this year is still being determined, but will be something
like “Sustainability in Action” or “Greening
MIT”. There are going to have a somewhat different
set up this year, organizing around 5 major themes which are Recycling,
Transporation, Energy Conservation, Green Purchasing, and Green
Food Service. Probably, the EHS table will go with the Energy
Conservation area.
2. Newsletter distribution. The winter newsletter
was distributed yesterday. There are copies next to the reception
area in a box. If you are going to campus, grab a bunch and
leave them somewhere. However, there are not that many extra
copies, so let Emily know when the supply is running low.
3. April Newsletter – Articles are due to Paula (pkduffy@mit.edu)
by March 6. We would like the newsletter to be available
the week of Earth Week, or the week before.)
Article
on unknowns (Already writing by Heidi)
Sustainability
Article (Niamh)
Building
66 Steam Leak (Susan Leite(Edited version of submittal to Faculty Newsletter))
Nanomaterial
update (Marlilyn)
Vernal pools
and amphibians-written with a green twist (Tim and Emily)
Earth Day
articles – Paula with something from the National Earth Day Scene
Best Practices – Niamh
to inquire and investigate practices related to Sustainability. Abby
to write-up practice in Student Life around Universal Waste Management.
Update on
Green Ambassador Program- if there is something of interest.
Article
on SOP updates, mentioning any new SOPs and/or significant changes to SOPs.
Inspection
system update – Gerry.
An article
on the OSHA Log for MIT, with summary of injury statistics/categories for the
year. (Bret Dyer).
Puzzle with
a little survey – Abby and Emily
4. Budget. Members of CST have participated in budget
discussion, and said the process involved providing ideas and recommendations
that went to Lou and Bill V for consideration. There were
a couple of ground rules. The proposals could not result
in a reduction of services the office provides, and they could
not involve cost shifting.
The budget discussion resulted in some cost cutting proposals
that impact the CST. The first involved printed newsletters. The
second involved giveaways. And finally, the third involved
consulting support, since the office is reducing/eliminating consulting
services provided to us. This means the newsletter editor, Paula,
will not have a contract with us as of July 1. However,
the editor will be provided some extra work this year to help offset
this loss for us and for her, writing articles in advance for next
years newsletters. Also, it does not preclude the possibility
of special arrangements for her support if things improve, or we
have a special need. It has been proposed to eliminate
the printed copies of the newsletter. The total cost of FY
08 newsletters(four newsletters) was $27,281.15, with $7,724.55
of that being printing. Other costs are what we pay to Flanders
and Associates for Layout, and what we pay for editing.
We will not have a budget for giveaways. Consequently,
we did order a number of giveaways in the fall. Currently
we have a supply of reuseable shopping bags, pens, mechanical pencils,
stapleless staplers, and computer screen and keyboard cleaners. If
you want to see them, stop by Emily’s office.
At the CST meeting we did discuss some options regarding newsletter,
such as reducing number of issues with printed copies, instead
of eliminating them altogether. Printed copies are useful
for distributing at events fair, earth day, etc.
A survey to determine if people are reading our newsletter was
suggested. Also, a counter on the newsletter website was
suggested.
5. Newsletter website – some improvements have been
made to the newsletter website. Now the newsletters are listed
with a list of topics covered. Also, more links to the newsletter
have been added to some of the web pages from the EHS Office, and
to the topic index page, where the newsletter is now an item in
the permanent list of topics that you always see. There is
a hope to add it to the EHS-MS web page as well. These changes
were made to improve visibility of the newsletter, and in anticipation
that we may be eliminating the printed copies.
At the meeting, it was suggested a counter be added to the newsletter
web page. Emily said she asked Hao about that, and he said
he thought there already was a counter on the page.
It was also suggested a link to the newsletter be put in the gray
area on the Training page.
To view the newsletter web page, go to: http://web.mit.edu/environment/ehs/newsletter.html
If you have other ideas for enhancing this page, please let Emily
know.
6. Communication Plan. Emily asked if anyone had input
for the communication plan, which she plans to finalize by the
end of the month. No one had anything specific. There
was a discussion regarding communication of incidents to the EHS
office staff. People did express a concern that we do not
have a good mechanism for alerting members of EHS if there has
been a major incident in a timely way, and for providing a summary
of incidents and lessons learned. Incident reports are to
be filed on the M:drive in the Emergency Response folder, and people
can review those if they remember that.
Use of EHSNet for this purpose was discussed, and team members
thought that would be a good idea as a start. Still, there
needs to be a mechanism for someone putting together the information
and putting it up on the web page, and then for alerting the office
something of interest is posted there. Bret was going to
talk with Peter about some possibilities.
7. Other communication tools-should we explore some other
possibilities?
Short videos
Email Announcements
Brief messages
on electronic bulletin boards
Social
media
There is a project in the works to update the EHS Office web page
using a new software program called DRUPAL. This program
will make it easier to update web pages. It also has some
nice feature for incorporating short videos, pictures, etc. on
the website.
There was a brief discussion of making more use of other communication
tools available at MIT, though some do have a cost. We should
think about short, simple videos.
We also talked about having a Facebook page, but the group was
not too sure about that, and a blog, but there was a concern that
it could become a negative thing if people use it to write negative
posts about the office.
8. Go Around. Abby presented information that in
light of the recent flu death, there is a communication action
in the works about flu, handwashing, getting adequate sleep, etc.,
in the Department for Student Life. This effort is in conjunction
with MIT Medical. Niamh suggested that it would be good if
the Day Care Center was provided information. It was noted
that MIT Medical is out of the flu vaccine, in part because they
had a very successful effort this fall in delivering flu shots.
No other items were presented at the go around.
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