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Holly Hansell Consulting ,~ Introduction The eommissioners and lead staff from the North Suburban Communieations Commission (NSCC)/North Suburban Access Corporation (NSAC), and representatives from the NSCC member cities attended a planning retreat on February 26, 2005. This retreat was organized by NSCC Exeeutive Director Coralie Wilson and the NSCC Strategie Planning Committee. The retreat's purpose and goals were to 1) educate NSCC commissioners, eity staff, and NSCC/NSAC lead staff about various models for PEG access and institutional/eommunity networks; 2) determine the need for further planning by identifying issues and priorities; and 3) determine ifNSCC commissioners, cities, and staff had similar interests and priorities, . During the morning, three presentations were made by guest speakers. The first two speakers covered networks and different types of teclmologies and associated key issues; the third speaker presented various possibilities for PEG aceess operations, Holly Hansen facilitated the afternoon session, whieh eonsisted of a visioning exercise and a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) exercise, and discussions to help the attendees identify issues, priorities and common themes that might require further review and planning, This report addresses the afternoon exercises and outcomes, provides summary information as well as the full results of each of the exercises, and presents planning themes and next steps discussed at the retreat. Visioning Exercise The first exercise of the afternoon was a visioning exercise. The attendees were asked to imagine that they were writing a letter in February 20 I 0 to a eolleague who had been very involved with the NSCC but who had moved away and lost toueh, They were to write a letter deseribing the current aetivities of the organization in as much detail as they could, including things like staffing, programs and aetivities, board status, relationships with the cities and the cable company, etc. Small groups then discussed these "letters" and recorded their combined results. A large group discussion was then held and a master list was developed. The master list was created by asking each group to report an item from their list; if another group had a similar item, they checked it off their list so it was not duplicated on the master list. The final master list eontained items that had been on at least two groups' lists, The master list and the individual group lists were posted and participants voted for six items they believed were most important; they could vote for items on the master list and the individual lists. . Votes were made with color eoded dots: blue for commissioners, green for city reprcsentatives, and red for NSCC staff. Different colors were used to determine inhere were any significant differenees in priorities among those present that might warrant further study. These results were not discussed at the retreat and are not examined in this report. The three items or themes that received the most votes were: a wider scope of programming and services that also included more staff; NSCC eontrolling its own communications corporation, and that NSCC would become a regional entity. The detailed results of the Visioning Exercise appear in Attachment A of this report. The "raw data" in this section refers to "brown group" and groups of other eolors; the colors refer to the color of the marker each group used to make its list and have no other significance, .