Requirements for Groupwork

The principles discussed in this course will find practical expression in a project that you will develop as part of a team effort. This document describes individual and group roles and responsibilities for carrying out your group project. These include a set of commitments expected of each group member toward their group, how you will document your meetings, and how you will evaluate individual performance within the group.

Group Commitments

Effective group functioning requires that group members quickly develop a high level of confidence that the other members of their group will contribute a fair share to the collaborative endeavor. The following set of requirements are considered a minimal set of commitments that each student is expected to uphold:

1. To meet weekly with your group at your regularly scheduled time; missing or being late to meetings will result in your receiving a lower grade than your groupmates on the project;
2. To read your email at least once per day on Monday through Saturday and to respond to any issues, questions, or requests from groupmates. Sunday can be taken as a legitimate day to not be in contact, though some other day (such as Saturday) might be taken as the day off--please negotiate this among yourselves being sensitive of one another's religious and personal beliefs and practices. Note that by default, email should be sent to everyone's UWNetID account; if a member would like groupmates to send email to any other account, this should be documented in one of the group's weekly reports.
3. To make a good faith effort to meet with your group on an ad-hoc basis as needed;
4. To use other communication media (IM, phones, etc.) as needed for effective group functioning.
5. To treat your groupmates with respect in speech and manner so as to create an environment conducive to learning; being friends with or liking your groupmates is not the objective of the group experience, though it may enhance it. The objective is to work effectively as a group regardless of the personal feelings that one has toward the other group members;
6. To commit to perform a fair share of the group tasks on an individual basis;
7. To carry out your work commitments in a timely manner;
8. To uphold a high standard of quality in the work products that you bring to your group. You should complete a piece of work for presentation to your group at the same level of quality and quantity as if you were handing it in to the instructor;
9. To hold your groupmates accountable for their work commitments, both in terms of quality and quantity;
10. To post/distribute meeting minutes within 24 hours of the completion of the meeting if you are the minutes taker, or earlier if your group agrees to an earlier deadline.
11. To inform your groupmates as far in advance as possible when you know you will be unable to attend a meeting;
12. To take responsibility for contacting your group after a missed group meeting to determine what was discussed and what are your new responsibilities for the upcoming week;
13. To provide timely information to a groupmate who has missed a group meeting concerning the missed meeting and the groupmate's new responsibilities;
14. To contact the instructor immediately if any group member misses more than 2 meetings during the term or misses the first meeting. I will intervene in any case where a group member misses this number of meetings, but it is the group's responsibility to inform me of this.

Grading the Project

The project will receive a group grade. As indicated in the syllabus, this will be an integer between 0 and 4. This grade will take into account the extent to which you have met the project requirements and the extent to which the skills and concepts studied in the course are reflected in the project.

Group Member Evaluation

I will evaluate each group member's participation using the minutes, task matrices, the member's participation in class sessions, and the individual Group Member Evaluation reports that you will each fill out. These reports are due softcopy in CollectIt on the same due dates as the major milestones/deliverables.

Each individual will receive a score that approximates that individual's effort on the project -- the "individual multiplier" -- between 0 and 2. The grade you receive on a deliverable will be the group grade times your individual multiplier. The default multiplier value is 1. In some cases I will award a multiplier of less than 1; this indicates that I believe that you have committed less than your fair share to the group effort. In rare cases, I will award a multiplier of greater than 1. I award greater than 1 on the individual multiplier in those cases where there is a documented history of significant effort toward improving the group functioning, such as encouraging groupmates, helping others, resolving conflicts, and putting in extra time toward the project when it is needed.

Missing group meetings will generally result in penalties of around 5% in your individual multiplier, though your first group meeting is particularly important; if missed without documented cause, you will be penalized 10%. In addition, since we work on the project in class, missing in-class group responsibilities (such as presentations, check-ins, critiques, exercises/activities) it will count similar to missing a group meeting. If there is a documented history (in your weekly reports, group member evaluations, etc.) of contributing substantially less than your fair share to the group's effort, your individual multiplier will be sufficiently low that you will not pass this course.

Group Website

Your group will build a project website on the Internet that is publicly accessible (i.e. anyone in the whole wide world can access it). You need to establish this within 24 hours of your first meeting, and email its url to the instructor (jtenenbg@uw.edu). Your project website needs to include the following items on the homepage:

• group name
• date of last update
• names of group members
• an email address that I can use to email to the entire group at once (you can request one from UW Information Technology). Feel free to make this an image or to spell it out (email at domainname dot com) to reduce spam risk.
• an area with links to your weekly minutes and task matrices,
• an area with links to check-ins and deliverables

Weekly meetings

Meeting Roles

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.

Meeting Agenda

Each meeting should have an agenda that is planned at the end of the previous meeting by all group members. The agenda should include

• when and where the meeting takes place;
• who is the facilitator and minute taker;
• a reminder of when the next meeting is and who will be facilitator and note taker;
• who is bringing what work products (or other items) to the meeting;
• a list of the topics of discussion, along with who is addressing each topic (if not a general discussion), and for how long each item is to be addressed; make sure to include the following at the end of each agenda:
  • a short discussion on group "process" or effectiveness;
  • spending time at the end to summarize resonsibilities, fill out the previous and current task matrix and equity table;
  • spending time at the end to set the next meeting's agenda.

The first item on the agenda should always be to discuss the agenda, which may involve adding or deleting items, and reordering items. At some time during each meeting, please spend a few minutes to discuss how the group is functioning. Consider those aspects of the group dynamics that contribute to the success of the project. On the other side, please raise any issues that you believe are interfering with the effectiveness of the group and your ability to complete the project on time -- best done directly but with kindness.

First Meeting

During the first meeting, please determine a group name (this will help in referring to your group and in establish a group identity), establish a regular meeting time each week 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:

1. How will team members deal with another team member who appears to exercise too much control over the team?
2. How will team members deal with another team member who does not appear to be shouldering their responsibilities within the project, or who is not contributing during team meetings?
3. What will you do if there is inclement weather that prevents one or more group members from traveling on the meeting day/time?
   

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 deliverable of the project. Make sure to divide up responsibilities before leaving the first meeting so that you will make concrete progress toward meeting the first milestone.

Celebrate achievement

Weekly Reports

Minutes

• The group name,
• meeting date, start time, end time, and location,
• who was the facilitator and minute taker,
• who attended and who was absent,
• one or more paragraphs that summarizes 1) what you discussed, and 2) what group decisions were agreed to.

These minutes should take less than 30 minutes to complete, and should provide a record of your discussions and decisions. Please put all minutes into a single file, adding the minutes for the current meeting at the end of the document. I recommend using googledocs for this purpose, since can they can be made world-readable and writeable by each member of your group. Here is a Word document with sample minutes that can serve as a template.

Task Matrices

Each week, you will update your task matrices. A task matrix is a table that clearly documents who has committed to what tasks to be completed when for the week. Each task for each person should be listed in its own row, and all rows (tasks) associated with each person should be grouped consecutively. If two people are undertaking the same task, list these tasks separately for each person. In this way, you can keep track of who has fulfilled their task commitments and who has not. A task is expressed starting with an action verb, and is usually followed by some kind of document. Thus state "write and post minutes" rather than "minutes".

You should keep a single spreadsheet (I prefer a googledoc for this) that clearly specifies each person's responsibilities. Add each week to the end of the spreadsheet. Each person should fill out their actual time to completion for the current week's commitments prior to arriving at the next weekly meeting. For the upcoming week, you should list the responsibilities each person has committed to, providing due dates and estimates for completion times but not actual dates and completion times until these tasks are completed.

Here is an Excel spreadsheet with a sample task matrix that can as a template.

You should ensure that you divide tasks so that

1. Each task can be completed by the next meeting. That is, subdivide your tasks into sufficiently small units so that they can be achieved by the time you meet again.
2. Task completion is easily verifiable by all members of the group. Guard against listing the start of tasks, and instead simply write the task that is to be completed. For example, rather than writing "Start drafting section 5 of user manual", instead state "Write section 5 of user manual". Stating that a task is to be started provides "weasel" room for the person to complete this task in 30 seconds ("Well, I started the task, but I didn't get very far"), whereas stating what tasks are to be completed provides a more definitive guideline that is less likely to cause misunderstanding.
3. Strive for equity for actual hours worked; if you cannot achieve this for each week, then you should try to achieve this across each milestone and the entire term.