WRIT 310 Blog Post 13

Purpose Statement: This blog post will describe and explain the group charter that we've developed, which will guide our behavior and expectations of one another as we work on our group white paper.

For this group project, we set a couple specific guidelines on how the group will function:

• Designate a group editor to maintain specific style.

• Discuss out of class meetings while in class/in person.

• Agree on and understand individual responsibilities within the group.

We also came up with a list of principles we'd like to follow:

• Maintain good communication through text or in person.

• Be receptive to ideas from others.

• We can only thrive if we act like a team.

• Present ideas and feedback in a constructive and gracious manner.

• Ensure individual responsibility and respect each other’s roles.

Finally, we developed a plan for dealing with lack of adherence to the rest of the charter:

• Reach out again to a person who hasn’t responded to any communication. Ask the person in person/in class if they saw the text or email. Then, if the problem persists, ask Melanie to reach out to the person.

• If a member of the group cannot maintain the charter and the problem persists after Melanie has talked to the person, we will each do a group evaluation on each member and submit it to Melanie so we can be graded according to the effort we put in and how well we maintained this charter.

• If other problems arise, talk to the group with honesty and openness and resolve the problem in person or in class. If the problem is unable to resolve, have a team discussion with Melanie moderating.

The middle section is probably the most important and also the most abstract. We came up with these principles by discussing what could go wrong in the group and how we can pre-empt those problems.

The first section is more administrative, making sure that we agree that people will have different roles (including a group editor, which I think is a great idea to give the project a consistent and unified tone.)

The third section was designed to resolve conflict among ourselves if possible, but also use our professor as a resource to help in mediation. It's also very focused on open communication, which is one of the principles we want to keep.