Composition of Council sub-teams
Sub-teams may be Council-specific (reporting to either TAC or UAC), or cross-Council (including members from and reporting to both Councils).
Sub-teams should have a minimum of 4 members.
Cross-council teams should have a minimum of 2 members from each Council.
Council members will serve on at least 1 and no more than 2 sub-teams per term.
To support continuity, sub-team members are encouraged to serve on the same sub-team(s) for the duration of their Council appointment. Exceptions to this can be made at the discretion of Sub-team and Council leadership.
At the end of each term, requirements for staffing sub-teams for the subsequent term will be determined as Council members complete their appointments. New Council members will be assigned to sub-teams as required and according to members’ skills and interest.
Sub-team leadership
Each sub-team will have a designated lead and vice-lead. A Council member will serve in each role for one full term, with the vice-lead succeeding as lead in the following term. At the end of the term, a new vice-lead for the next term will be selected from the sub-team membership. The selected vice-lead must have at least 2 years remaining in their term (or be willing to stand for re-appointment at the end of their first term).
Cross-council teams should have a lead representing one council and vice-lead representing the other. This will guarantee that leadership of the sub-team will alternate between the two Councils.
The sub-team lead will schedule and run meetings and be responsible for reporting the work of the sub-team to their respective Council and quarterly reports. The vice-lead will assist the chair as needed and appropriate.
Sub-team responsibilities
Sub-team meeting attendance is required. If a team member must miss a meeting it will be that member’s responsibility to notify the team lead in advance and review the meeting notes following the meeting.
At the beginning of each term, each sub-team will draft a work plan for the year, informed by priorities suggested by the sub-team at the end of the prior term.
At the end of each term, each sub-team will draft a retrospective of the sub-team’s activities for the year, to include:
An overview of major activities for the year
Discussion of any items from the work plan that were not completed
Recommended priorities for the next term
Sub-team meetings
Most sub-teams typically meet monthly, at a regularly scheduled and mutually convenient time. If a sub-team’s work is closely aligned to the ArchivesSpace release schedule (e.g. Testing), regular monthly meetings may not be necessary. Some Leads or Council Chairs elect to us the same time every month, others create separate Doodle polls for each meeting.
Subteam leaders may use whatever scheduling and video conferencing software they choose, but typically meeting times are established by free Doodle polls and Leads and Chairs use Zoom accounts to host and run meetings. Subteam Leads that wish to wish to use the community Zoom account (provided by LYRASIS) should review Community Zoom Account Guidelines for more information on how to access that free resource.
Leads are encouraged to create Doodle polls and send meeting invites well in advance of meeting times. Schedule meetings promptly so that meeting availability is not impacted by delays in picking a date.
Ahead of each meeting:
Schedule the meeting using your web conferencing software of choice and give your members appropriate notice
Create an agenda Meeting Notes Template
Send a calendar invite with the date, time, and link to the agenda, and meeting software link/invite
In each meeting:
Designate a note-taker, either ahead of time, on a cycle, or a call for a volunteer
After each meeting:
Consider assigning action items and follow-up email reminders about pending work or decisions
Sub-team Workplans and Retrospectives
[this section is a work in progress]
Workplans and how they are drafted will vary by term and especially by team. The best way to understand workplans is to review prior plans for your team. If you are a new team, or a Lead that was not involved in the drafting of your prior workplan, here is some generalized advice on the process.
When considering the work for a new term, it is helpful to understand that term activities tend to be made up of routine work (that work which repeats every year and is considered the core of the work) and new projects and initiatives (or discrete projects taken on during a term). Balancing these two types of work is the goal of the workplan and the challenge of subteam leadership.
Some teams focus primarily on routine work and do not take on new projects on a term-by-term basis. The real goal is simply to set reasonable expectations for your work, agreed on them as a group, and then the Lead should use the workplan to check in on progress and realign (if needed) through term.
To define routine work, start with your subteam’s charter or description, which is recorded on the parent page for each team. You can find these either by navigating to your subteam’s page on the left side of the wiki, or navigating to the following page, where all the subteam descriptions exist in one place: About the ArchivesSpace Councils
To define project work, start with the prior term’s retrospective. You can find your team’s last retrospective by navigating to the prior term’s pages in the wiki.
Terms
Council terms are 3 years beginning in July of the year a member joined and ending at the end of June three years later, i.e. July 2022-June 2025. Extensions of one year are permitted in cases where the extension will aid in leaderships transition (i.e. allow a Vice Lead in their last year of service to extend for one additional year in order to be Lead for that period).