Week 2: Meeting and Roles

We had our first Wednesday Meeting, (outside of class and school hours), and were able to quickly problem solve some obstacles we found with online voice meetings. I noticed several voices would try to nudge themselves into the conversation to talk, but would quickly go quiet, back down, or be talked over. I wanted to find a quick solution to this so that everyone could get a say in, so I jumped in during this same meeting and proposed that we create a hand raising system to keep track of who wants to talk next. This idea took form as a text channel called "Hands Up!". Almost immediately this transitioned our jumbled meeting into a queue of hands so that we could make a comfortable space that allowed everyone their time to be heard and share ideas. This was a small innovation but a very important one for our group's communication as we move forward.

The Second most important thing we established was our Agile workflow and roles. To an extent, we had touched on our Agile workflow organically, before we has been introduced to the concept in class on the 28th in our meeting on the 26th. We had been discussing general roles within the group and how we wanted to divvy up work, and I struck on a well liked idea that we would create our roles based on our immediate deadlines, and they would transform and shift as new deadlines and deliverables came into the scene. On Friday, we established four roles for the foreseeable future that would expand beyond immediate deadlines . The Scrum Master, Scribe, Art Director, and Story Supervisor. One thing I didn't like about these titles is that they have innate leadership denotations and feel more like Leads than just roles. I wanted to ensure that we don't create a hierarchy in our team and stay as democratic as possible, so I proposed that we task these roles with the responsibility of bringing organization, ideas, and content to the table that is voted on by the group to either approve, revise, or discard. This was important to me because it enforces the idea that these roles are here to support our process rather than take charge of other members. Lastly, I thought it would be in good fun and go along with the aforementioned mindset to rename these roles to something silly and lighthearted rather than these lead type names. This gave birth to the following titles. The Scrumbler (scrum master), The Scribbler (Scribe), The Sketchlar (Art Director), and the Scripter (Story Supervisor).

Aside from these key developments I updated our documentation and begun work in Miro at the recommendation from our Professor. More information on these roles can be found in our Production Contract.