# 3.3 Building your team

The size of your team and the roles you need for a project to collect [voice data](#user-content-fn-1)[^1] will depend on your project’s aims, context, and available resources. [**Community members**](#user-content-fn-2)[^2] are at the center. They make recordings, check the quality of the data, and give feedback to the team and to other contributors, so they should be involved in shaping the project from the start.

Here are the key roles and typical responsibilities of a project team that helps community members to contribute with their voices:

* **Community engagement lead:** supports contributors, organizes training, creates guidance materials, and collects and responds to feedback.
* **Language expert:** helps edit or develop the available texts, advises on dialect and linguistic features, and helps with translation or content for the community. Note: not all voice contributors are linguists, and not all linguists will want to make recordings. These can be two distinct roles.
* **NLP specialist:** makes sure that the data meets quality standards for its intended use, from defining scope through to publication.
* **Technical lead/engineers:** maintains the data collection platform, deals with technical issues, and makes sure that data is handled and stored securely.
* **Data protection specialist:** takes care of privacy, processes for informed consent, and ethical data use.
* **Project coordinator:** manages timelines and budgets, and makes sure there is good communication between team members.

| <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXedPK8NKs625txxlFmXTt0YZX3yKg9QPd118ymmfVwjXrd3W_hHNObPNJ5ff0HOWoio9NtqQOL0eIzTVH2B6jCBLB3A6npLptGqxqPrZDT19fK9BIX0ecJ3_9txEQzAhPKZ4JcP?key=LjOaNqlneHjM8MYR-1Jh9w" alt=":magnifying_glass:" data-size="line">  <mark style="color:blue;">**Case study: The team behind CLEAR Global’s TWB Voice projects in Hausa, Kanuri, and Shuwa Arabic**</mark>                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| <p>Three core teams supported CLEAR Global’s <a data-footnote-ref href="#user-content-fn-3">TWB Voice</a> projects:</p><ol><li><strong>Community team</strong>, including:</li></ol><ul><li>Community Lead: Designed and led the strategy for community engagement, organized feedback surveys, and ran a contributor <a data-footnote-ref href="#user-content-fn-4">recognition program</a>. This role helped us to identify the difference between shared challenges and challenges specific to a language.</li><li><a data-footnote-ref href="#user-content-fn-5">Language Leads</a> (Hausa, Kanuri, Shuwa Arabic): Each language had a lead who helped with linguistic tasks, checked the quality of contributions, and kept up direct communication with their community.</li></ul><ol start="2"><li><strong>Technical team</strong>, including:</li></ol><ul><li>a computational linguist who helped design prompts, advised on quality guidelines for data collection, checked data quality at regular intervals during data collection, and helped with processing and publication of the datasets.</li><li>platform developers who maintained the TWB Voice recording platform and dealt with technical issues that users reported during data collection.</li><li>Data Protection Lead to ensure compliance with data protection standards, including <a data-footnote-ref href="#user-content-fn-6">GDPR.</a></li></ul><ol start="3"><li><strong>Project coordination team</strong>, including:</li></ol><ul><li>two project managers: one to oversee the overall project timeline (from defining the scope to dataset publication), and a second to focus on daily tasks in the active data collection projects and contributor support.</li><li>a Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) specialist who designed feedback mechanisms, a monitoring framework, and a learning review to inform future projects.</li></ul><p>There were also some supporting roles, including finance, HR, logistics and a communications specialist. Most of the work was done remotely. Team leads met every two weeks, and sub-teams more often to manage daily tasks. Slack, a platform for team communication, was used for quick updates and to track issues, especially for resolving tech problems quickly.</p><p></p><p>Key learnings on team structure from the pilot projects:</p><ul><li><strong>Combine or split roles based on capacity</strong>. With smaller teams, one person could take on more than one role—for example, a data protection lead could also help with project management, or a Language Lead may also manage community engagement.</li><li><strong>Focus on critical functions</strong> beyond the set roles and responsibilities. For example, we used tools like Whatsapp for communication. This meant that multiple team members had to monitor and help with communications in those channels.<br>It was also helpful that several people understood the structure of the TWB Voice platform. This helped avoid delays when the main team member was not available.</li><li>The <strong>workload of the Language Lead varied a lot</strong>, and sometimes they had too much work. In future projects, we would try to separate community engagement from linguistic tasks. We would also train contributors to help with activities like collecting and organizing the voice recordings. This would help to avoid bottlenecks.</li></ul> |

[^1]: **Voice data:** Audio recordings of human speech. These recordings capture the acoustic features of spoken language, such as pronunciation, speaking patterns, and rhythm.

[^2]: **Community members:** People at the center of a project who contribute by recording and validating data. In this context, community refers to their shared interest in contributing to data collection and the languages they speak. Community members are well positioned to provide feedback on linguistic aspects and offer input on the project's direction and needs.

[^3]: **TWB Voice:** A platform for collecting voice data. It was developed by CLEAR Global, who also own it. Users can make voice recordings to help with active data collection projects in TWB Voice by [signing up to the TWB Community](https://translatorswithoutborders.org/join-the-twb-community/). The main goal of TWB Voice is to help to develop voice technology for speakers of marginalized languages. For example, by creating the voice datasets that are needed to build language models for TTS and ASR.

[^4]: **Recognition program**: A system of rewards (points, certificates, or money) to motivate contributors.

[^5]: **Language Leads (LLs):** Language experts with lots of experience. They can do spot checks to ensure quality and can give feedback.

[^6]: **The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):** A European Union law that deals with personal data. It tells us how to collect, process, store, and share data. It makes sure people have control over their personal data. It also ensures that organizations handle such data in a transparent, secure, and lawful way.


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://twbvoiceplaybook.clearglobal.org/3.-setting-up-a-project-to-collect-voice-data/3.3-building-your-team.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.