Organization

The idea is to get things done with little to no mistakes, and early. How can we do this without forgetting a bunch of things? Being more organized.

• I want to propose the idea of having a massive term checklist with a linked, dynamically updating calendar for deadlines to motivate us. Edit this hypothetical page to mark items as complete, or add/remove items. View the entire team’s tasks in operation. I think this would allow for a more comprehensive look at the entire flow of the team. I believe (emotionally, not logically) Notion has some sort of way to nest tasks within tasks as well.
• Create a Google Calendar syncing team events. Ideally linked to Notion.
• Create a Team Member form every term to confirm if existing members would like to continue to join, and if new members who have completed the bootcamp want to officially join as well. This lets us have zero effort in curing a list of all design team members, and gives us a concrete reference for our member count (useful during WEEF pitch, or for other sponsorships.) Ripping this idea straight from WARG.
  • Members can also voluntarily submit photos of themselves to be put on the team website.
• Google Drive is just fundamentally not a dynamic hub for organizing a student team. I highly suggest we switch to Confluence or Notion as soon as possible; next term, even.
  • Nesting documents within categories and cross-linking documents is so much easier and visible on something like Confluence. Organization is not about hiding everything in folders - I want to have the information in predictable locations, but not hidden from plain sight.
  • Google Drive naturally obscures information. It’s a storage application, not a documenting application. Google Docs is a (formal) document creating application, not a many-document organizing application.
  • Switching also makes it so that we can have our docs open to the public. This does a few things:
  • (1) it makes us feel more accountable for the quality of writing we produce on internal documents (thereby increasing quality of work),
  • (2) it lets self-motivated, intrigued prospective students read up on the philosophy of the team before they even join, and;
  • (3) it makes new student onboarding easy by publicly hosting the intro projects on the platform and then simply telling everyone, “complete our onboarding and you’ll be a part of the team!” No more sifting through Google Forms, and no more being ‘selective’ because we can’t handle the volume of student interest.
  • Having a platform built for easy documentation allows for endless documentation - which is a good thing, given a search function exists. The more documentation exists, the easier it is for new members to not get lost and unmotivated.
  • View WARG’s organization and breadth of documentation for a good example on the topic.

Semantics

I want to change the hierarchical naming structure to something more traditional. While having Team Lead, Project Lead, and Member is simple, it’s simply not descriptive enough. As the team scales, I believe we should be labelling with things such as: Director, Advisor, Project Manager, Senior Member, Member, etc.