I mentioned that the IACC was having a meeting of the “Implementation Workgroup” previously. The meeting was held today.

If you are wondering, they are very easy to “attend”. You can either call in to a listen-only line or you can also watch the presentations they are working on. For this meeting, the presentation wasn’t as useful since they weren’t changing foils very often. Listener’s got most of the gist without the slides.

That said, I wasn’t able to listen to the whole meeting, but here are some impressions of what I did hear.

The implementation group is charged with “implementing” the strategic plan. No surprises there. They are not supposed to rewrite or reinterpret the strategic plan. Most of the meeting was really centered on “How much will it cost to meet this goal”. People could say things like, “We think this could be a supplemental funding to an existing project”. Such funding would make the research start sooner and, presumably, be cheaper.

Estimates for the costs had an amazingly large range. As in, one group would estimate at, say, $2M, and another group would say, $25M. A lot has to do with assumptions. Starting an entirely new project is more expensive than using existing research teams with existing cohorts, for example.

Some of the discussion crossed the line into remolding the strategic plan, but the chair was pretty good at getting things back on track. By lunch, though, they were way behind schedule.

One note: I was very impressed with Wolf Dunaway. He is an autistic adult. Budgeting is not his area of expertise (as far as I can tell). But, he was giving really good suggestions throughout.