You should meet as a group at least once per week, for at least one hour. The intent of this meeting is to synchronize efforts, build group cohesiveness, identify deviations from targeted delivery dates, establish work commitments, and validate the successful (or unsuccessful) completion of previous commitments. Additionally, subsets of your group may wish to meet together for purposes of carrying out some of the specific project tasks. You may also require additional full-group meetings at different times during the project. Experience from groups in previous terms indicates that groups meet on average 2 - 4 hours per week, fewer hours at the start of a milestone, more hours as the milestone approaches.
One characteristic of the successful groups from previous classes is that they establish a meeting day and time at the start of the term that meets everyone's schedule, and the individuals in the group make a commitment to attend each of the meetings. Non-attendance at group meetings may have a negative impact on your project and on individual grades for the project.
Each meeting should have one person who is the facilitator and one person who is the minute taker (or scribe. The facilitator is responsible for making and disseminating the agenda, ensures that the agenda is followed, ensures that all group members participate, encourages all to talk, and prevents dominance by any one person in the group. The minute taker is responsible for writing up the meeting minutes and distributing them to the group members within 24 hours of the meeting. You should rotate these roles each week in an equitable fashion, and the facilitator and minute taker should always be different people at any given meeting.
At a minimum, each meeting should have an agenda that is planned at the end of the previous meeting by all group members. The agenda should include
Each meeting should be carefully documented, and added to the document repository for the project in its own directory. The minutes for the meeting should include:
You minutes should also include a table that clearly states who has committed to what tasks to be completed when. Each task of each person should have a separate row in the table, even when two or more people have the same task. In this way, you can keep track of who has fulfilled their task commitments and who has not. This matrix should also indicate the date on which each task commitment was completed. Note that the completion date should only be filled in at the next weekly meeting by the entire group
You should ensure that you divide tasks so that
Finally, you should include an equity estimator table. This table summarizes the information in your task matrix, this time organized by group member, one individual per row. That is, every item from the task matrix should be reflected in the equity table, and no items should be in the equity table that are not also in the task matrix. In addition, there should be a final column that provides a numeric estimate (out of 100) of each person's contributions (based on tasks committed to) for the forthcoming week's work. The sum of these numbers for any particular week should always equal 100. Again, have this equity estimator table be cumulative by never deleting previous weeks but simply adding one week at a time to the table. An example table is provided in the previous hyperlink. Note that the purpose of this table is to help you to ensure equity in task division among group members. Although there will certainly be week-to-week variation, on balance, try to ensure equal participation by all members.
Please see the example weekly report to get a sense of how the above expectations play out in practice. Also, please see the following Guidelines and feedback on weekly reports that I wrote early in the Fall 2001 term to provide more guidance to groups about weekly reports.
The minutes of each meeting should be handed in hardcopy by the minute taker (or by the minute takers, if there was more than one meeting during the week) weekly at the start of class as indicated in the master schedule. Also, make sure to keep all copies of minutes in a directory of your document repository, which will be handed in electronically at each milestone with hyperlinks to these minutes from the main index file, as detailed in the Project Document Layout Requirements.
Minutes will be graded based on their understandability, their completeness, and their adherence to these guidelines.
During this first meeting, please determine a group name (this will simply help in referring to your group), establish a meeting schedule for the balance of the term and determine a rotation schedule for who will be facilitator and minute taker at each meeting.
Please discuss and make agreements (documented in your first weekly report) on at least the following issues:
By coming to basic agreements about some of the most contentious issues of groupwork before these issues have surfaced will provide a basis for discussing and dealing with these issues when everyone can approach this topic calmly. Another benefit is that by putting these issues on the table as legitimate for group discussion, it makes more explicit the co-responsibility that all group members have toward one another, and helps to avoid some of these difficult situations.
Your first meeting should include a discussion of the commitments that individuals are expected to make to one another as detailed in the Group work section of the course syllabus. Ensure that everyone has correct emails and phone numbers for contacting one another.
Your first meeting should also include a thorough discussion of the first milestone of the project, of the document repository, and related issues. Make sure to divide up responsibilities before leaving the first meeting so that you will make concrete progress toward meeting the first milestone.