Assignment #7

I am a member of Cornell’s MineSweeper (CMS) Team, part of the Frame and Drivetrain sub-teams. Our goal is to design and fabricate a completely autonomous, all-terrain robot capable of landmine detection in a humanitarian effort. The team was started only last year and as you may imagine, there is a LOT of work involved. CMS relies heavily on Haythornwaite’s notion of community verses society, in that CMS must have attributes of a community in order to be effective.

From a Social Networks Analysis perspective, Haythornwaite describes a community as having strong interpersonal ties, a shared focus, and a common language. Specifically, a community must have common ground, reciprocity, and strong/weak ties in a social network. CMS certainly has these attributes.

First, common ground, this is where the ‘actors’ share a common purpose and work together to achieve this end. Being part of a project team, all the actors share a common enthusiasm for automotive design and fabrication. The majority of the team consists of mechanical engineers, and each can tell you that a rocker-bogey suspension is passive and each will say MAE 427 sucks. We all share a common interest in mechanical/automotive design and on top of that, we all are taking similar classes. In this way, strong ties are developed within the group by staying up to ungodly hours working on project team and then finishing up those problem sets for class.

All the major project team’s labs are in the basement of Upson, CMS works alongside teams like FSAE, Baja, CUAUV, CUair, etc. This leads to inter-community interactions. I’ve made friends with FSAE team members just by being in the lab, this in turn forms weak ties that I could utilize if I need spare parts or tools they may have.

CMS thrives on reciprocity, the notion that members of a community will give help without any expectation of receiving it back. CMS is a young team compared to some of the more established teams leading to inexperience within the younger class (freshmen, sophomore) while the current seniors already have previous project team experience. So as a senior, I find myself spending extra time teaching the freshmen how to use tools and helping them get acquainted with the machine shop. Even though I do expect some work accomplished from the frosh now that I taught them how to use ANSYS, for example, I could have ‘thrown them to the wolves’ so-to-speak, but instead spent face-to-face time helping.

In terms of CMC synergies, CMS would not survive without it. CMS uses google documents to update part order lists, email for communication, a private forum for design discussion, FTP for CAD file storage/sharing, and obviously FTF communication. Most FTF interactions within the team will undoubtedly involve phrases like ‘remember that email I sent’ or ‘check the CMS folder for the Solidworks part;’ CMC strongly facilitates our tasks.