1. Summarize and report out on the results of the SKS exercise.

Start doing: more work on papers, more work on presentations, every time we meet we should have a rundown on what each person achieved individually that week

Keep doing: quick and helpful communication, having everyone present when working

Stop doing: relying too much on Belle, relying on the team to do small things that would advance our project like refilling the humidifier

2. Develop a detailed Collaboration Plan for your team clearly articulating your Goals (Small g and Big G), Roles, Procedures, and Relationships.

Personal Goal: To develop a process that yields high amounts of mushrooms with minimal effort. I want to achieve this goal by experimenting with different types of substrate and inoculation process.

Project Goal:

To scale mushroom production in Sierra Leone to a level that can fight malnutrition in the youth within the country as well as make year-round farming and circular agriculture viable within the existing culture.

Roles:

Belle: leader/expert – relays information to new members and facilitates overall progress of the project, helps wherever is needed
David: analyst – prepares and conducts experiments regarding scaling and other subjects that can move the project forward
Asgar: recorder- helps document the process/experiments that the team is conducting so that teams in the future can easily refer back to our work.
Jawara: implementer: turns our plans and ideas into tangible products that can be sold in the market.
Khanjan: facilitator – monitors the team’s progress and provides guidance to the project team

Procedures:

Decision making: deference to expert; we all give our input but usually follow Belle’s informed judgement as she often has more valid opinions based on her experience on the team

Effective meetings: we meet up 2 to 3 times per week to conduct experiments and work on our research paper. Other than that we have a weekly meeting with our advisor where we go over our plan for the week and other pertinent information.

Communication: we use a text group chat where we are all very responsive to questions and scheduling meeting times; we have never had a problem reaching out to one another

Relationships: Our small team and similar dynamics allow us to get along and work together extremely well. We are all dedicated to the success of this project and enjoy working alongside one another.

3)If we can’t do fieldwork the summer, what will we do?

If we can’t go in the summer we plan on solidifying our process of growing mushrooms. Ideally, we would conduct experiments in the summer to see how to seamlessly grow approximately 100 kilograms of mushrooms per week. However, with the Corona virus situation, we are planning on experimenting individually at home and giving our results to the team to see what can be done in Sierra Leone whenever we are there. Also, we want to continue our weekly communication with Jawara and keep him informed of our experiment results as well. Lastly, we want to learn as much as we can about cultures and communities of Sierra Leone before we actually go there.