PLO 7. Demonstrating Effective Collaboration, Decision-Making, and Leadership in Team Settings

Course / Experience: LIBR 559U: Blockchain Technology for Information Professionals 

Artifact: LLM-Powered Archival Q&A for Clio-X developed for the Blockchain@UBC Blockathon for Social Good

My role: Team lead; led the design and prototyping of an LLM-based archival question-answering workflow, coordinated the retrieval pipeline and containerized execution logic, and helped guide technical and architectural decisions under platform, privacy, and compute constraints. Github: https://github.com/nemoming/Blockathon25-Team404

This artifact reflects my achievement in PLO 7: demonstrating effective collaboration, decision-making, and leadership in team settings. Our Blockathon project aimed to make archival data more accessible through natural language question answering while respecting data sovereignty, privacy, and responsible AI principles. The Clio-X environment brought together concerns from archives, research, and technology, which meant that our team could not succeed through technical skill alone. We had to coordinate across different priorities: archival access, ethical governance, compute-to-data restrictions, low-resource execution, and the practical challenge of making heterogeneous records searchable and usable. That environment made leadership less about authority and more about integration. What made this project especially meaningful to me was the amount of judgment it required. We had to decide how to structure preprocessing, how to separate retrieval from model inference, how to align the architecture with the compute-to-data framework, and how to keep the system modular enough to support different archival datasets such as the Enron Email Dataset and the Cameroon Official Gazette. My leadership role involved helping the team keep sight of the whole system rather than treating each technical task in isolation. I found myself repeatedly translating between goals, constraints, and implementation choices so that our solution remained coherent. In that sense, collaboration was not only about dividing labour. It was about sustaining a shared direction while adjusting to new information and technical limitations. 

This project also taught me that leadership in information settings often emerges most clearly under pressure. We encountered a steep learning curve with Clio-X’s data model and compute-to-data interface, spent significant time debugging Docker builds and job metadata, and had to confront unresolved issues such as sensitive information, multilingual retrieval, and compute accessibility. Those challenges pushed me to think carefully about how to move a team forward when the path is not straightforward. I assess this artifact as strong evidence of my development in PLO 7 because it shows that I can contribute not only as a builder, but as someone who helps organize decisions, maintain direction, and support collaborative problem-solving in a technically and ethically complex project. At the same time, I would like to continue strengthening my leadership by gaining more experience coordinating timelines, documenting decisions for teams, and supporting collaboration across even more diverse stakeholder groups. Self-assessment rubric score

Overall score: 4.75/5

Connection to PLO: 5/5Clarity of role: 4.5/5Depth of reflection: 4.5/5Relevance to career direction: 5/5Readiness for professional application: 5/5

Short rationale for score:This artifact strongly demonstrates leadership, decision-making, and collaboration in a real team setting shaped by technical, ethical, and organizational constraints. It is especially relevant to future work in research support, digital scholarship, and technology-rich information environments.

Copyright and permissions note

This artifact was developed collaboratively as part of the Blockchain@UBC Blockathon for Social Good. In the final portfolio, all team contributors should be named explicitly in the artifact credit line. The artifact is included for educational and reflective purposes with attribution to all contributors. Copyright in the group-created project content is shared among the student creators unless otherwise specified. Any third-party datasets, platform references, screenshots, or external infrastructure referenced in the project remain the property of their original rights holders and should be used only in ways consistent with citation, educational fair dealing, dataset terms of use, or permission requirements.