Collaborative Plan (Updated): Bishoy, Tommy, Ugochi, Allison
Goals
- Project Goal: To create our app, Save Tuba, that will help the citizens in Kazakhstan become more sustainable and environmentally aware.
- To measure the success of our project, we need to collect data on how many people use the app, on the rate of recycling in Kazakhstan, and possibly do interviews to see how people think it has changed their lives. There will also be quizzes in the app to track environmental education of the users.
- Personal Goal (Alli): To broaden my knowledge on the school systems in Kazakhstan, and learn how to integrate a gamified, educational app into their curriculum. Also to gain a better understanding of the culture in Almaty.
- Personal Goal (Ugochi): To understand the in-depth process behind successful and impactful smart innovations, and leave the project with an ability to implement similar innovations in other cities.
- Person Goal: (Tommy): Learn the process of implementing a gamified learning tool into schools. Better understand how partnerships work to complete a task.
- Personal Goal: (Bishoy): Improve writing and research skills to better understand how impactful papers are written and how to get published in the research role. To set realistic expectations for our app to synthesize a distribution process where it reaches the most people.
Roles
- All of us have been working on publications. Each of us have an E4C article published, we have a paper accepted for GHTC, and an IEEE paper in the works.
- Now, as our project is beginning to have more concrete tasks and has a more detailed plan, we have focused on various subgroups. Tommy and Bishoy are working on the app development and testing, Ugochi is working on the wireframe and the visuals, and Alli is working on the sustainability tasks. However, there is overlap; we are each helping each other with all the tasks if we need help.
- We don’t have one project manager, but we each sort of head various tasks. So some of us are the “project managers” of a certain publication, or of creating the MVP, etc. Ugochi and Tommy worked on the venture over the summer, so they are most knowledgeable on the project right now.
Procedures
- For decision making, I think we should strive for consensus, but if we hit a specifically difficult topic, then it might have to be majority rules.
- Right now we have been doing a lot of communication online, and it seems like it is going to have to continue to be that way. However, as many zoom meetings, or “face-to-face” simulations we can have, the better. Texts (GroupMe) and emails are good substitutes when we cannot zoom right away.
- For meeting roles, it depends on the meeting, as our roles will shift. However, usually we all do a good job of each taking notes, and all keeping time in mind, and facilitating together.
- We are meeting at an additional time (aside from the one with Khanjan). We have been having a zoom call every Thursday evening to debrief on the work we have done, and plan out what we still have to do.
Relationships
- Everyone on our team has different strengths that play well into making us work effectively. We have various majors and disciplines across our team, including computer science, engineering, and international relations. This allows us to use each other’s strengths to solve any issues we may come across. We also all have different cultural backgrounds which helps us look at everything with different perspectives.
- Our team name is Save Tuba.
[Individual] List ten specific ways in which your teaming approach has changed/evolved since you started, teamwork skills you have developed, and lessons you have learned:
- I learned that it is very important to take action and get stuff done, but validation from team members is as important, not only to make sure I don’t have mistakes, but to ensure that everyone is on the same page of the project.
- Each one of us should take the task he/she is most comfortable with, in terms of expertise.
- Make sure we are always doing something to advance the venture forward; in other words, make sure we do not have weeklong pauses with no work getting done.
- Everything should be done at the right time, so we don’t waste time. For example, there would be no point of applying to funding at the beginning of our project, rather spend time planning the project thoroughly and effectively.
- Make sure you have done enough research before jumping to conclusions. At the beginning of the semester we jumped right into the app idea, without doing enough research, then we had to reconsider our idea and do more research first.
- We are now more comfortable with each other, thus we are able to assign tasks to each other and call each other out on unfinished tasks without feeling uncomfortable.
- It is very important to keep connections. Our connections with our partners have gotten weaker and there is a need to validate our app, but we didn’t exactly stay in touch and ensure the connection is live, thus it will require more work to jumpstart the connections.
- I learned to understand that everyone has their own life going and on and I should understand that not all of us may have the time to spend on this project as much as needed.
- We definitely grew to produce care more about the quality of the work we get done, rather than just getting it over with.
- Our relationship with our advisor is now more open and we are able to easily express concerns and he is also able to understand that we have classes and other commitments.
- My time management skills improved to allocate more time for this project and get things done on time.