The tasks to accomplish in week 12 included contacting team members and opening lines of communication, choosing a topic, splitting up the work, writing a proposal, and providing support documents detailing the progress of the group and the individuals within it.
Earlier this week our group set up communication lines via emails and have shared instant messenger screennames and google accounts. This was certainly the hard part of this week's goals, as it is difficult to reach everybody quickly when all you have is asynchronous communications initially (e-mail). We plan to utilize Google Docs to collaborate as a group and create the white paper and its supporting documents. Once we begin sharing documents via Google and using the collaborative features that are built in, the group's progress should speed up.
To choose a topic several group members brainstormed ideas until finally the best one was selected: open source vs Microsoft products for use in academic institutions and not-for-profit businesses. We have split up the work evenly and will be rotating people each week to write this group activity report. Also individuals in the group are tasked with individual activity reports which will be posted by Sunday night.
Matt is finishing up the proposal and will send the group an initial draft for us to go over and revise before submission later tonight. As a computer technology major, I have background knowledge of the topic, and as such, Matt and I have begun the initial process of performing research on the internet. We plan to find both factual information such as benchmarks of the software, and provide examples of companies and governments that find success with both open source and Microsoft software. We want the white paper to remain as unbiased and objective as possible, and let the reader make the decision between two good choices: open source or Microsoft.
Future Tense
While this is most likely a function of this being the first activity report, note that much of it is in the future tense. Make sure that in the future you report on the work you have done in addition to the work you have planned.