Meet the Team
Who is building Library Navigator, how we work together, and who we are building it for.
The Team
Every member writes code. The roles below describe where each person carries primary responsibility, meaning who chases a decision when it stalls. They are not the limit of what anyone works on.
Our Client
Our client's research group is building a picture of what North Carolina's public libraries actually offer, particularly health information resources, and how well rural patrons can reach them. Her students spent June and July assembling the dataset behind this project: every county, every library system, every outlet, and the digital subscriptions attached to each. The chatbot is the front end that makes that work reachable by the people it was collected for.
She meets with the team weekly, on Wednesdays and Thursdays by preference, and has asked for a short written update even in weeks with no meeting.
Team Rules
Agreed by the whole team. Amendments require agreement at a team meeting and are logged in the journal.
Communication
- The team group chat is the primary channel for day-to-day coordination.
- Messages that ask something of you get a reply within 24 hours on weekdays, even if the reply is only to say you will answer that evening.
- Anything urgent, such as a broken build before a demo, is a phone call rather than a chat message.
- All email to the client or the professor goes out from the Client Manager with the rest of the team copied. Nobody emails the client alone.
- Decisions made in chat are not decisions until they are written into the journal on this site.
Meetings
- Attendance at the weekly team meeting, the coach meeting, and client meetings is expected.
- If you cannot make one, say so at least 24 hours ahead and send your status in writing beforehand.
- An agenda goes into the group chat before each meeting. Notes are posted to the journal within 24 hours after.
- Every meeting ends by naming action items, an owner for each, and a due date.
Working agreements
- Work is divided at the weekly meeting. Taking a task means committing to a date.
- Raise blockers within 24 hours of hitting them, not at the deadline. A blocker surfaced early is a team problem. Surfaced late it is a crisis.
- All work happens on feature branches. No direct pushes to the main branch.
- Every pull request needs review and approval from at least one teammate before it is merged.
- Work is done when it works, a teammate has reviewed it, it is documented, and it is merged.
- Client data and anything the client marks confidential stays off this public site.
- No credentials, API keys, or dataset exports in the repository.
Decisions and conflict
- Decisions are made by consensus where possible. If the team is still split, the Project Manager decides and the reasoning is recorded.
- A decision that has been made and logged is not reopened without new information.
- Disagreements are raised directly with the person involved, early and in plain terms.
- Anything that cannot be resolved inside the team goes to the coach, and then to the professor.
- A missed commitment without notice is discussed at the next team meeting. A repeated pattern is escalated to the coach.