Collaboration Plan

Due 1/30

The purpose of this document is to set clear expectations among your group mates. For the collaboration to be successful, it helps to establish some guidelines/group norms that serve as a starting point. Moreover, it is often difficult to track who thought of what when working on a research project, so having a frank discussion on authorship plans early in a project/before it begins helps reduce the risk of poor outcomes later.

Your collaboration plan should address the following:

1. How will you divide responsibilities? Will some students be responsible for certain portions of the project, or will you be more integrated and decide on responsibilities on a weekly basis?
2. About how much time do you expect every group member to spend on the project each week, on average? It is okay if this number is higher toward the last couple of weeks of the semester.
3. When and how will you meet? You should plan to meet at least once per week for at least 30 minutes to check in on one another’s progress, get help, and plan for what comes next. Identify a day of the week, a time, and the place/platform you will use to meet. We strongly recommend having a consistent time and not having ad-hoc times as needed.
4. What platform(s) will you use to communicate between meetings? Will you primarily use email, text, Slack, or other chat apps? If you want a more professional enterprise tool, Duke provides free access to Microsoft Teams.
5. Where will you track who is doing what tasks and when those tasks will be done? This can be as simple as a Google doc with a checklist or as advanced as a Trello board. What is important is there is a clear repository of who is doing what, the status of that thing, and when it should be done.
6. Where will you store data, code, writing, etc., so that all group members have easy access to shared materials? Given your data is likely education data, we strongly recommend you use Duke’s Box and GitLab. Make sure to also share these with ksm@cs.duke.edu or kvs13@duke. edu when you create these.
7. How are you going to decide authorship order? Order should be based on how much someone contributed to a work, with the first author contributing the most. This should be explained in terms of at least:
   1. How much text you wrote

   2. The ideas you contributed

   3. The amount of text you helped support in terms of proofreading, confirming, etc.