The Global Change Consulting Consortium

 

What we do:  We are ready to do all manner of studies in global change, other than regulatory work that is best left to organizations with the full training and the interest in such matters. Similarly, we are not prepared to offer purely economic analyses.   

 

At this moment, we are beginning our function as a corporation.  For some types of services, there will be a delay until we can offer the services of the standards to which we are holding ourselves.  The services that we propose are:

 

• Policy and planning studies, and prospective views  – bringing together active researchers with up-to-date expertise in diverse disciplines, as needed, to synthesize and analyze the state of the knowledge on virtually any topic in global change.

 

• Workshops and training on the scientific issues across any required range of disciplines, focusing on the physical and biological sciences, while ready to extend to the social sciences. 

           Workshops can be arranged at any appropriate venue and time, and at relevant scales of numbers of participants and of number of presenters and their suite of expertises.

 

• Laboratory and field work, of the scope that can be accommodated in the laboratories and facilities of consortium members.  Why so?  We note the unique design of the GCCC, that the resources are not limited to those that can be gathered in a central facility.  Rather, they are the collective resources of the members of the consortium at their own institutions, constrained only by terms of use at their institutions.

 

Attibutes of our work:

 

• Breadth: As the membership of our consortium grows, we aim to cover a great variety of fields in the life sciences,  social sciences, engineering, information sciences, industrial operations, agriculture, law, business, earth sciences, and more.  A list of over 300 specialties in which we seek members is given at the end of the page accessed by clicking on How we operate and then on For members, or simply clicking this link.

 

• Standards:  High standards of scholarship derive from, first, recruiting the leading practitioners of many specialities as members, and, second, selecting a team of members for any project based on the specific needs of each client.  The consequent advantages for members and clients in the consortium are several.

 

• Limited overhead costs: The members have base support from their home institutions rather than as permanent staff at the GCCC with a continuing cost.  Their work for the GCCC is on their release time; the consortium negotiates assurances that the time alloted by members for their work on GCCC projects is sufficient, in amount and in scheduling.

 

• Appropriate focus of work: Serving clients well also demands pragmatism.  High standards of scholarship are pursued, yet not for their own sake.  The requirements of timely delivery and of direct relevance to the client in format and content are as important.

 

• Scope and depth of studies: we are prepared to offer studies of any reasonable range of magnitudes in coverage, cost, and time frame, appropriate to the needs of the client.

 

Our mission statement is accessible in full here or on the navigation bar.  In summary, our goals are

• To offer scientific studies on global change intended to lead to solutions that are effective, economic, and equitable
• To be efficient, particularly by operating as a consortium: for any work requested by a client, we compose a team of our consortium members.  We design all the component tasks, and each team member agrees to a set of tasks, a schedule, and a remuneration.  The client gets the best team from a national or international pool, and the members get rewarding work while retaining their principal employment, typically in a university.
• To offer open solutions where feasible and fair, while fully protecting all proprietary material as requested
• To offer new perspectives.  We invite you to examine a list of global-change issues that we frame in ways both tried and new.

 

   First, please note that we are building our business.

·        We completed incorporation and licensing in August, 2007.  The co-founder, Vince Gutschick, recently made the transition from an academic career, moving to full-time GCCC work on 1 January 2008.

·         We are ready to be engaged.  We anticipate a smooth spin-up. The founders are ready to find team members for any project in timely fashion, from among their many career contacts in diverse sciences.   Our infrastructure is spare and needs little scaling up because of our unique consortium design.  Over the next several months, we will be implementing a system with Web-based conferencing, collaboration, application sharing, and secure databasing.