We just had an Australian-team only three day retreat (“mini busy week”) in Gerringong, on the NSW coast, about mid way between Sydney and Canberra. It was very good to be able to see each other again after more than two years. These three days were very productive, with a focus on getting ready for the production of the final PDR documents.

On the week of May 9-13, we are planning to have a consortium busy week. For a number of reasons, we are not looking at moving the whole Australian team to Europe or vice versa: Instead we will be trying something quite innovative: We will gather the European team somewhere in Italy and the Australian team somewhere away from Sydney and Canberra. Two poles. This way we hope that everyone will be able to shift their schedule more easily than if we were working as usual, and we should have a few good hours of overlap every day. We will see how this goes, but it is definitely following a logical trend of saving on international travel, for environmental reasons, cost, fatigue, etc.