Team milestones

Further expansion, systematization of team activities and the beginning of institutionalization. Continuation of ongoing projects and initiation of several new areas of activity.

Completed

During January-March 2023, the number of team members increased to about 25. This rapid growth created the need for team reorganization. As a result, in January, the team was divided into four units: Scientific, Educational, Communications and Wikipedian. Each unit consisted of 3-10 members and completely took the work of one or two fields.

The Scientific Unit continued the TESS-UA-2022 project and organized a small conference to help TESS-UA participants consolidate their knowledge.

The Educational Unit opened a direction for research preparation and began creating the first element of the training system – a video lecture course, which later became known as Variable Stars Lectures. This was the first version of the course, although it was hastily made and not very high quality, it quickly bore fruit. We decided to use this approach because, as expected, over the next two years, more than 150 people enrolled in this course. Consequently, it would have been physically impossible to conduct individual training for each of them.

The Unit of Communications inherited the management of social networks and communication with our subscribers.

The Wikipedian Unit, in its turn, continued to massively improve existing and create new astronomical articles in the Ukrainian Wikipedia. Initially, this process was chaotic – each member edited what they wanted. However, starting from February, the unit switched to thematic projects lasting from 1 to 4 weeks and covering several dozen articles.

Incomplete

Since the team was divided into units, internal communication has become a major problem, especially communication between members of different units. The amount of information processed by the team increased proportionally to the number of members. The combination of these factors led to a number of negative consequences, including:

• Inefficient and extremely slow communication between units, which was particularly acute during the projects involving two units simultaneously.
• Repeated total chaos in some processes, especially in the Communications Unit, despite all efforts to combat the chaos. As a result, members did not know who was responsible for doing what, and unit heads and the CEO sometimes assigned conflicting tasks. Additionally, task duplication became common, with two team members independently doing the same work twice.
• A flow of unimportant information and minor tasks constantly distracted the CEO and the heads of units from more important work.

Fixing all these problems took us many months and became one of the reasons for a cascade of additional troubles.

Conclusions

1. Despite all the chaos within the team, the first quarter of 2023 was very productive. This includes a whole series of lectures, dozens of Wikipedia articles, and promising results from TESS-UA participants.
2. We need to approach our project preparation much more responsibly. We often started projects without the necessary components, thinking we would complete them during the process to avoid delaying the start. This approach led to complications that took much more time than the potential preparation itself.