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Unread 25-07-2011, 23:25
Imperium283 Imperium283 is offline
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Re: Building just isn't a priority anymore

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tassemet View Post
To be completely honest, I haven't seen an issue with this for the team I used to be on. 309 did FTC (and this may vary because it's FTC and not FRC) but we had about 20 people on the team. of those twenty, about 10 regularly attended meetings and those intent on staying put in the effort after school and the long night sessions we often did when last minute parts came in.

Several times, our team won the spirit award, especially the competetion where one of our cheerleaders found a sharpie and a stack of sticky notes in her purse. So saying you have to put in a lot of work to get the spirit award doesn't seem like a logical excuse to me, you need to cut members.

Now I won't lie, it was nice when those who didn't touch the robot where around, just socializing. Sure it was distracting, but during the long nights when working on a rig went from a 1 to 6 hour job due to finding some new innovation, it was nice to take a break, and roll out with the team to the nearest dunkin' donuts for coffee and a donut. Now, those who were interested in art made up our engineering log, and we had one kid who was good with CAD. Again, these didn't compose more then 10% of our team.

We didn't have to enforce an "hours to travel rule" but it was generally understood that if you didn't pull your share of the work, you weren't welcome to come. However that being said, we did make rare exceptions to those who had real life committments come up first (like my brother and his mandatory (aka show up or you don't get credit) AP afterschool classes, who despite that would text me ideas based on feedback I gave him about 300 feet away in a classroom), and for those who came to the afterschool sessions but couldn't stay late. they were welcome too. Again, it was also nice having extra people incase we had issues (a programmer lost his USB drive and had his car break down- thank god the other programmer was there with a copy of the program) and during the competetions, some people did double duty of pits/coding or PR/scout/ you get my drift.

But 50 people on a team for spirit? I like the idea of incorporating an application. Just watch that sometimes these people join up as a clique- you lose one or deny one, you lose 5-7 others- which according to you might not be so bad after all.
This is one of the most reasonable ones most of all. I wish our team had that tone, that building is the priority, but we don't know how to set that tone. And when we try, it backfires on us socially
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