ISMT Task Force Meeting Notes
November 17, 1999

Present: R. Roberds, R. Abel, R. Amenta, S. Frysinger, J. Herrick, G. MacDonald, J. Sochacki, J. Steele, G. Taylor, C. Welter, T. Wood, P. Henriksen taking notes.

Absent: R. Kolvoord, R. McKown, R. Rice, and C. Talley.

Opening Remarks. Bob Able was able to be present for this meeting and was introduced. We began with Bob discussing his background. He does budget operation at the system level for NSF. There was some discussion of the parallels between NSF processes and priorities and our task in determining the high-value programs we want to recommend.

Dick provided proposals he had received that were not posted on the web.

Preliminary Discussion

Processing proposals. We are not just collectors and coordinators of the proposals. We will be adding our own ideas, place the proposals into categories, prioritize them, and make recommendations. Some proposals and ideas could be inappropriate. We will also synthesize proposals, as appropriate.

Criteria for ranking proposals. One criterion could be cost and resource input. JMU might not be aware of the cost of doing science, and this could be our chance to educate JMU on the cost of science. We could put many of these ideas on cost in an introduction to the final report. On the other hand, we could ignore concerns with cost. We probably know what's cheap to do. Order-of-magnitude idea could be important, but that could be hard to do. Have to be careful not to close doors by giving incorrect cost estimates. Cost might not be a criterion but we could use it to make a point. There will probably be a Phase III beyond this Task Force where financial and other considerations will be determined.

Processing of Proposals

We are preparing a process flow chart. Do we need to give feedback on web board? The question was raised of sending a message to people when their information is downloaded. It was discussed that e-mail would be okay as a response and that Web response would be unwieldy. We could evaluate proposals at meeting. Eventually, we would vote on proposals.

Criteria

NSF has budget priorities. These were mentioned in an address by Rita Caldwell, the new NSF Director. They are: IT, biocomplexity, education for future. She also made many references to connections between disciplines. New exciting areas for NSF are in interdisciplinary sections. Details are in recent speeches on the NSF home page: www.nsf.gov. We could take some cues from NSF's criteria on initiatives. Doug Brown is interested in doing things that would be distinctive but not compete with larger universities. Our criteria should reflect that. What are criteria for quality?

The rest of the time was spent with the task force members providing items that tey felt would be pertinent as criteria we should use. The list was:

Criteria

1. Building on existing strengths. (Taking advantage of existing strength).
2. Degree of innovation shown in the proposal, or innovativeness/timeliness
3. Breadth of support (number of faculty, or number of departments, or number of colleges involved).
4. Will it encourage collaboration?
5. Seriousness of the interdisciplinary nature.
6. Impact on undergraduate students (education).Modifiers:

Does it focus on students and their employability
Does it have academic rigor
Does the proposed program have flexibility
Will it result in the student's development
Is there no negative effect on undergraduate program(s).

7. Sustainability (potential for continuous improvement; if research, will it eventually be self-supporting; etc).
8. Does it have value for the non-science major.
9. Is there a positive impact on General Education.
10. Does it bring distinction to University
11. Does it represent a distinctive JMU niche?
12. Does it add value to the region, state, or nation.
13. Does it address the quality of impact on society?
14. Does it add quality of life to the stakeholders.
15. Focus. Is the program sufficiently focused?
16. Timeliness of the program.

It was recognized that some of these various criteria may overlap, or be better stated. It would help if "modifier" words could be included to illustrate each criterion.

We will try to complete the criteria on December 3. In the meantime, the task force members' homework is to think through the criteria, add ones they believe are missing, look for ones that could be combined.

Next meeting: Friday, December 3rd at 8:00 a.m. in Taylor 308.