UA Women’s Hackathon

The Crow team is excited to be a part of the University of Arizona’s Women’s Hackathon for 2021. We’ll be offering a workshop, “Collaborating online: Lessons from a Successful Team,” on Saturday, March 6, at 1:00pm Mountain time. Michelle McMullin, Shelton Weech, and Bradley Dilger will be facilitating.

Collaborating online: Lessons from a Successful Team
Based on the experiences of an interdisciplinary software design and research team working at multiple sites, we share three principles for collaborative teams who prioritize inclusivity and mutual respect. Examples and practical techniques will help your team work together more effectively both asynchronously and when working together in person.

We offer three best practices you can adapt to your team:

1. Build visible infrastructure: For online teams, digital infrastructure is the documents and communication that facilitate work. We share the consecutive agenda, our approach to keeping notes and agendas for meetings, and principles for using a team communication platform like Slack, Basecamp, or Microsoft Teams.
2. Practice active listening: Krista Ratcliffe describes active listening as actively seeking to hear what is different about the ideas of other people. We offer several concrete approaches for listening actively to others on your team.
3. Coordinate work purposefully: Distributed teamwork requires connecting people, tools, and documents that are separated geographically, sometimes in different time zones. Scholars call this work coordination. We describe ways to coordinate work across documents and digital infrastructure.

We’ve created a template for the consecutive agenda Crow teams use to combine meeting agendas, notes, and links to our team communication platform. Examples of other techniques appear in the video presentation.

Our materials:
A video of our presentation, for those unable to attend synchronously.

The slide deck for our presentation is also available.