Document aim: Communicate responsibilities involved in playing the “scheduler” role for a crew.

🙏 Thank you

If you’re reading this, you have volunteered (or are considering volunteering) to help as a scheduler for an EA Crew. This is a rad thing to do for your peers, you’re awesome.

👩‍✈️ What you’re agreeing to take responsibility for:

A scheduler has three vital roles. They make it it clear to the crew:

1. ⌛ When the collective plane is leaving
2. 🗺 Where the plan is going
3. ⚠ Whether the plane is still on course.

This means getting everyone to the call, ensuring there’s a shared sense of what you’re doing there, then bringing it to the group’s awareness if what is happening isn’t what the group intended to come together to do.

If you agree to be a scheduler for a crew, you’re agreeing to take responsibility for ensuring the following occurs:

1. Scheduling: Using a group chat to coordinate a time everyone can meet for 90 minutes once a week for 6-7 weeks (depending on whether your crew has 4 or 5 members).
   • We’ve generally found a combination of messenger, When2meet, and calendar invites get the job done.
   • We’ve found it works best if it’s the same time each week.
   • Sometimes rescheduling is necessary but try as much as possible to minimize schedule changes and not skip a week.
2. Agenda setting: Generating and sharing an idea in advance of what the meeting will be about. For example, checking with a group member on whether they would be willing to bring a case, and then posting in the chat “John will be sharing a case this week, here’s a link to the template we’ll be following if you’re interested”.
3. Keeping time: Reminding crew members a day and hour prior to the meeting.
4. Ensuring there’s a pilot: On game day, someone is nominated to run the template and notice if the group is deviating from it (which can be totally fine, so long as it’s intentional). Generally, we’ve found that “the scheduler runs the template for the intro and first case clinic, and then it shifts to whoever last did a case” works quite well.

🙅‍♂️ What you’re not agreeing to take responsibility for

When taking on a role in facilitating a group experience, in addition to knowing what you’re responsible for, it can be quite helpful to know what you’re not taking responsibility for.

When scheduling a crew, I often choose to care about these things, but am generally not agreeing to take any more responsibility for ensuring they happen than any other crew member:

• Convincing people to keep crewing if they lose interest
• Ensuring everyone has a good time: Unlike a more involved facilitator role, you don’t have to take responsibility for how people are experiencing the crew. This is something everyone takes on to the degree they feel comfortable.
• Fixing people’s problems: It’s not up to you, in particular, to ensure the crew sessions fix people’s problems
• Pulling the meta lever: If it seems the group should transition to talking about the conversation it’s having and the way it feels, you’re not more responsible for making that transition than anyone else
• Keeping the crew going after the 6 weeks is over: Sometimes the 6 weeks finish and the crew is “humming” and wants to keep meeting. Sometimes it doesn’t. No one is responsible for making that go either way.
• If it does keep going, to keep serving in the same capacity: In fact, we would recommend if the crew does keep meeting after 6 weeks you start rotating the scheduler role.

❓ F.A.Q

• Q: What if try crewing and I have questions or run into difficulties A: Email us at [email protected], and we’ll get back to you promptly!