Contents:

• List of Areas of Responsibility (AORs)
• Purpose of AORs
• What exactly is an AOR
• Areas of Responsibility in detail

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List of Areas of Responsibility of the LDSA

The comprehensive list of AORs (Areas of Responsibility) is:

• Organization Administration
• Teaching
• Community
• Dev-Ops
• Marketing and Communications
• Partnerships
• Quality Assurance

Purpose of AORs

The purpose of defining Areas of Responsibility is so that when a task needs to get done:

1. The task can be unambiguously assigned to someone;
2. Someone is responsible for ensuring that the task is done;
3. The task doesn’t end up in no-mans-land.

If we can control for these 3 factors, the enjoyment of volunteer work for the Academy should stay much higher. Remember, we don’t want tasks to be a source of stress so the process of distributing them and executing on them should have the smallest number of ambiguous steps as possible.

What exactly is an AOR?

An Area of Responsibility corresponds to a type of job that needs to be done in order for LDSA to achieve its mission. This kind of organization design is obviously not an exact science and there will always be tasks that don’t clearly fall into one Area. But we need to have a starting point and this is it!

Primary Enabler

Each AOR needs to have a face associated with it and this is the Primary Enabler!
This is a single person who is responsible for coming up and making sure that tasks that fall into their area get done. Not necessarily performing the tasks themselves! Although the Primary Enabler will execute many tasks that are in their area, you can and should delegate tasks by assigning people and due dates to the tasks.
You can see who the primary enabler is on the Member directory

Slack channel

This is where you have any discussions that are short-lived or quick questions.

Documentation sources

Right now we’re storing information in 3 different places:

• Wiki: public, contains all required rules and final processes that we want to expose for transparency as well as current issues and discussions. Repo;
• Google Drive Index: private, contains meeting docs, extra things like evaluation spreadsheets, etc.;
• Google Calendar (Staff + Students): private to staff + students, respectively, contains all important dates and deadlines.

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Areas of Responsibility in detail

Each of the following is an area of responsibility with a brief description of the kinds of tasks.

Organization Administration

• Ensure that big organization-critical tasks are done
• This includes writing job descriptions, getting bank account, strategies are written
• Encourage and ensure that each AOR documents and updates their processes and information;
• Review and update stale/obsolete documentation;
• Manage main Wiki issues
• Encourage staff to use the organisation tools for documentation and communication
• Maintain the Wiki pages;

Teaching

• Ensure that instructional material is owned and delivered. This includes assigning LUs to instructors and making sure that they get done on schedule.
• Ensuring that guest instructors clearly understand what is expected of them and make realistic commitments.
• Define what concepts should be taught
• Define the order in which these concepts should be taught
• Ensuring that students have a path to success
• Gathering feedback from students
• Making sure students have a voice and can be heard

Community

• Create and develop a Lisbon Data Science Community
• To ensure that events run well. The requirements for events may change slightly and the vast majority of the effort is concentrated at the beginning of the batch with the bootcamp.
• Communicating with hackathon and bootcamp hosts to ensure delivery of things like food and internet connection are present.
• Manage the volunteers onboarding, offboarding and that keep track of general motivation

Dev-Ops

• Ensuring that students can set up their machines
• Ensuring auto-grading infrastructure availability
• Hosting and running the hackathons

Marketing and Communications

• Ensure that visibility and credibility of the academy is communicated
• Identify target audiences
• Set and execute communication strategies for audiences
• Answer or route questions that come in on open channels (info@, fb messenger, etc)
• Work on communication strategies (need to be defined what this means)
• Maintain the unbounce page

Partnerships

The Partnerships team should ensure that any relationship that we have with other companies or organizations stay healthy and are in line with the LDSA Charter. You must also ensure that expectations for both organizations are in line and that it is a worthwhile experience.

Some specific tasks in this are are:

• When we are contacted by outside organizations, they receive a polite, warm, and professional greeting.
• Any time that an existing member wants to propose a partnership with an outside organization, you will take over the process or help guide them through it should they prefer to stay as the primary contact.
• After sponsored events, following up with the sponsor and make sure that their expectations were and continue to be met.
• Publish and promote job opportunities within the network

Quality Assurance

The core product of the Starters Academy is the educational material. Unexpected issues such as bugs in the code or an exercise that is unclear and is likely to cause lots of confusion cause significant problems because of the number of people involved. In past academies, we have lost many man-hours fixing learning units after they have been released to the students.

This area of responsibility is to ensure that no obvious mistakes make it into any learning material that is delivered to students. Less obvious things such as subtle mistakes in spelling or grammar or maybe even a contradiction of an earlier learning unit should be looked for but are not nearly as important to catch as bugs or totally incorrect questions.

Some specific tasks are:

• Making sure that notebooks run before they are released to the students
• Making sure that a notebook accepts the correct answers
• Doing one final reading of any material before it is released to find obvious issues

Final Notes

If you have issues deciding where a task should go, feel free to contact the Executive Team directly! It is that person’s responsibility to make sure that everyone is happily contributing :-)