Volunteers for workgroup representatives? | Project management | Forum

Volunteers for workgroup representatives?

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8:06 pm
November 13, 2009

Luke Maurits

Adelaide, Australia

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posts 1483

Does anybody want to volunteer their services as a workgroup representative? As discussed on Reddit, this is not a position of power or authority, rather it gives you the responsibility of preparing monthly reports of progress within the workgroup and using the discussion in your workgroup so far to estimate costs, masses, etc. I suppose it makes sense for workgroup representatives to also be moderators of their workgroup's forums, so that they can keep discussions on track (so there's a *little* bit of power :).

I would like to volunteer as Navigation and Guidance Workgroup Representative. As far as I know, none of the others are spoken for. Is anyone interested?

I imagine once we are a little more organised, the process for filling these positions will be more structured (e.g. people will be elected for fixed terms or something), but I think given that the project is so small at the moment, we can just appoint ourselves as we see fit.

Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

8:44 pm
November 13, 2009

quailman

Sacramento, California

Member

posts 8

If we're just appointing ourselves for now, I'll jump in the ring. I'd be the workgroup rep for a group working on the unmanned payload. I know that piece of the project is not exactly on the straight line path to our goal, but it looks like we're going to soft land an unmanned craft at some point as this project progresses, and we may as well have a small payload that can win the xprize or do something interesting.

We could have some discussion as to whether this group should even exist, as it's not directly in our line of goals. Even if we do put this group together eventually, maybe my efforts are better spent representing another group while our numbers are small. I'm up for others thoughts on this, but it's the piece of the puzzle that I've been slightly obsessing over the last couple days, so I think it's a group I'd have fun representing.

9:49 pm
November 13, 2009

Luke Maurits

Adelaide, Australia

Admin

posts 1483

Hmm, I hadn't quite anticipated this. Not the umanned landing, that was to be expected, but the idea that it would constitute a separate workgroup. The current workgroup structure was designed to split things up across skill sets/disciplines. But a project like "unmanned lunar lander" cuts across most of them – it will require navigation (Navigation and Guidance Workgroup), communication (Communication Workgroup), etc.

The problem with creating an ad hoc "Unmanned Lander Workgroup" is that then, e.g., our radio wizards would need to pay attention to the Communication Workgroup *and* the Unmanned Lander Workgroup, and so on for all the other groups.

The obvious solution to this would be to redefine the workgroups so they cut across crafts/mission types, but in a sense this reduces their usefulness, in that they don't split the work into independent sub-projects.

We could define our workgroups hierarchically, with the current structure mirrored for manned and unmanned missions, but that feels like it may result in too many groups for us to sensibly keep track of.

Is there a particular part of the unmanned lander project you are interested in? If it is mainly the shape/size/functions of the unmanned lander, you might perhaps be best off working within the Spacecraft Engineering Workgroup?