What a busy first week! It’s always a slog to get the initial admin and organization tasks set up, but I think we’ve really established a rhythm that will work for the team. We’re all onboarded with Discord (thank you Joanne!), trello, and some organized Google docs.

I volunteered to be PM because of my professional experience working in this area. I’ve gotten pretty good at herding the kittens to the finish line over the years. But I also jumped at this role because I don’t have another super strong skill that would be applicable to this specific project. I am really looking forward to providing support on our content/editorial strategy and hopefully shadowing some web development. I think I’m suffering from a bit of imposter syndrome and not giving myself enough credit because I know that I could pick up any skillset quickly if I dedicate myself to it. It’s fascinating to see what each of our backgrounds are and what we all bring to the project. A few things that kept me busy this week as the PM: setting agendas, scheduling the weekly meetings, sending out notes and action items, and putting the final tweaks on our group project proposal and collab agreement.

We met on Sunday afternoon for our first out of class sync, and we were very productive. A few high level bullets on what we discussed:

• What’s our goal number of submissions to the archive? We’ll need enough submissions to allow for the user experience to be compelling. You’d scroll more or go to a second page.
• It will be very important to ask everyone the same controlled, open-ended questions. Editorial control is important here.
• We looked at the site coronastories.world. Model for us to see the pros and cons.
• Explore and decide between using Adobe Portfolio and WordPress for our prototype.
• Thinking about longevity of the project: How will the archive live on after this semester?

We covered a lot. And we know we can’t yet come up with the perfect plan for all of this right off the bat. But it’s helpful to keep a running list of open questions to guide us both in our initial work, and over the next couple months. Trying my best not to get overwhelmed.

I’m inspired by our team’s willingness to jump right in. So far, we’re doing a great job of balancing expectations and scaling small. Scope creep is real, y’all.