Your 2nd assignment will build directly off of your 1st assignment.
By now, you should be well acquainted with the theme of the startups for this course, as well as your team. Your second assignment will be to identify areas where your team has expertise and where it may lack expertise.
The intention of this assignment is to help you identify strengths and weaknesses of your team, explore your own unconscious bias, and evaluate the general diversity of your team. You will be expected to identify some potential bias your team may have given their life experiences and describe how these biases may impact the project. You will further be expected to identify where you need to bring in subject matter experts and where you could improve your team’s diversity.
You will be expected to work together and submit this assignment as a team. Anyone can submit it, I suggest using an issue on the repo you’re about to create to coordinate that submission.
Your “startup” is global. The moment you launch, your project is global. It will target groups and demographics around the world, it will (hopefully) hire people who aren’t like you, it will grow as an collection of humans who are different. When your company lacks diversity, it stunts its own growth and contributes to toxicity in the industry.
Diversity is a very broad term and encompasses a lot of areas, both broad and niche. Some major areas of diversity include:
There are a lot more niche and broad topics that we could discuss, but this subset is just to get you started. The notion here is that people with different combinations of life experiences will help identify how your product may or may not work for them, provide novel ideas, and help with conflict resolution in the workplace as people are more accomodating by workplace culture of others’ differences, etc.
Keep in mind that we are not suggesting to selectively hire people based on their “diversity”, but to understand that diversity can help you grow and you can take proactive steps to ensure a welcoming environment for diverse candidates and customers.
You must create a release on your repo. This will give us a snapshot in time and allow us to grade it.
The release does not need to include pull requests or commits from every member. Please include the path location of the assignment within the release body.
| Section | Description | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| Expertise | Describes how each team member’s expertise can benefit the project | 15.0 |
| Lacking Expertise | Describes holes in the team’s expertise | 15.0 |
| Subject Matter Experts | Describes subject matter experts that can help fill those holes | 15.0 |
| Unconscious Bias | Gives thoughtful rhetoric on their team’s own unconscious bias and provides example solutions of how to help them work through it | 20.0 |
| Diversity 1 | Explain some areas, which you are comfortable sharing, where the team may lack diversity. You do not need to feel pressured to share or pressure colleagues to disclose anything to the team or publicly, but for the dimensions folks are happy to share, it will give you the opportunity as a team to determine where you may have blind spots on your team. Do not feel restrained by the subset listed above as there are many dimensions of diversity, visible and non-visible, that change how you experience the world | 10.0 |
| Diversity 2 | Thoughtfully describes how the lack of diversity in all of the specified areas can impact the company | 25.0 |
| Total: | 100 |
This scale is used for each line of the rubric above.
| Rating | Result |
|---|---|
| Outstanding, Thoughtful and thorough | 100% of pts |
| Strong, Provides some thought | 80% of pts |
| Acceptable, Simple explanation | 60% of pts |
| Insufficient, Little effort was made to give explanations | 40% of pts |
| Unacceptable, No effort was made or the section was missing | 0% of pts |