Working with a team in a new environment was a fun challenge. This was our first opportunity to apply some of the collaborative goals from the beginning of the semester and GitHub proved it's worth. While a fantastic way to organize work, communication had to be handled outside the GitHub interface. Group communication was established and handled on day one with the creation of a GroupMe "squad" to facilitate group synergy. The in-class meetings helped to quickly identify a common area of interest, Pittsburgh, and we all seemed interested in crime data.
Once we took a look at the data we intended to use, there was too much to draw simple observations. There was concern among the group that any particular selection of racial or gendered data would be affected by our own biases, so we elected to present the data fully. We searched for examples that may fit our data sets which could be manipulated by a user, allowing the user to make conclusions not basded on what we wanted to say but what the data said. This caused a problem, as the dataset was too large to be host directly on GitHub; that type of interactivity had to be hosted off-site. We fortunately discovered this issue early with the help of our Professor, constructing the visualizations and hosting them on plot.ly
After establishing this road map, we attempted to assign work loads to different members of the group. What was interesting about this process is that some of the duties switched both early and during the process. Whoever was able to do the job quickly and effectively got it done and we moved on. This type of competitive co-operative work enviornment was pretty foreign to me, and I was slow to adapt. Working with overachieving, hard working individuals isn't exactly the norm in the private sector. Everyone in the group went above and beyond to contribute and a type of project inertia was achieved. That shared interwoven responsibility is the epitome of peer pressure; instead of a Professor or boss being the sole individual you report to, every group member reports to all the others. The collective responsibile authority is decentralized and evenly distributed. It seems like a good way to work.
This distribution of work seemed to have two draw backs. Firstly, the rewards, grades, being non-continuous and not effecting the future, led us to be tentative in ambition and scope. If this project led to another, perhaps we would have been more willing to go out on limbs, try harder, and fail more. Secondly, it fell on those with the highest individual skills to be pace setters. An analogy might be cycling, where the best cyclist rides in front and gets the most air resistance. Or perhaps one or two people riding a bicycle while the rest stand on the side of the road and scratch their heads. These pace setters also necessaily plot the course, which can furthur leave behind the weakest members of the group. This additional responsibility may seem that it falls to the individual, but by now the project is a Thing. The group effort should then become a facilitation of the duties of that skilled leadership. The group gets a head. If group dynamics naturally create such a structure that looks so similar biologically to animals, does that indicate that the basic body structures of organisms is an emergent property of groups?