Assigning Roles to the Team
Before the team met for the first time, members filled out a Belbin type exercise (see link below) to see what roles different team members might be comfortable with.
www.123test.com/team-roles-test/
Team members shared their results and it was recognised that there were similar Belbin types in team.
Dominant Belbin types on the team included:
- Innovators who are independent generators of ideas,
- Drivers who push and challenge the team, and
- Executives who are good organisers.
Image of team members results taken from https://www.123test.com/team-roles-test/
So it was decided to break down work by disciplinary background.
The following team members would lead on particular elements, but with contributions and agreement from others.
- Kholoud and Ema to lead on technical development
- Supanoot to lead on blog administration and design (e.g of presentation for Dragons Den)
- Nina to act as project manager and focus on social/ethical/standards issues, and support any specific user research.
Agreed
Before this first meeting, each member of the Team had been asked to come up with an idea for a social network. This approach was based on research on brainstorming.
Various studies have found that groups that follow the classic rules of brainstorming (i.e bring people together to generate as many ideas as possible and then sort through these as a group), result in fewer ideas (and fewer good ideas) than individuals would have developed alone (Mullen et al 2010). Today it is recommended that brainstorming include phases of both divergent and convergent thinking – starting with individuals generating ideas on their own before bringing them to the group.
Several ideas for a social network were put forward by different members of the team, but it was decided by an absolute majority that Kholouds idea was the preferred option.
Kholouds idea was to design a social networks for both student and professional academics to support ‘matching’ students to supervisors.
The team also agreed a project name that was put forward by Nina. This was ‘MeetingsofMinds’.
Next steps/Actions
- Supanoot to set up Blog via link provided by Dave, and send others link.
- Kholoud to draft 200 words about project by Wednesday 21st. Other team members to give comments, and then Supanoot to upload project brief (approx 200 words) to blog by Friday.
- Everyone to look for whether there are similar networks out there already.
- Everyone to look for relevant research papers.
- Next meeting – if research shows this is a ‘novel idea’ that fills a gap, the next meeting will focus on brainstorming the features of the Network.