[loyal]

Our group, when it comes to management, has a President, VP, Treasurer, and Secretary. Since we are a rookie team, we had to spend almost a month of build time and time in December to organize ourselves. We held our elections based on a normal candidate/campaign structure with anonymous votes. Merit and popularity dictated who was chosen. We only have about 15 members, so our leaders also must work in a subteam (electrical, build, strategy/rules/fundraising/spirit/scout, Design/CAD, and programming). Many other responsibilities such as Drivers, drive coach, safety captain, and Scoutmaster have to be taken by students who already have multiple jobs. President and VP are mostly in charge of running meetings along with the head mentor. However, we make it a strict policy that mentors are only allowed to teach and help; students must do the work. In general, we are very democratically run, to the point where it takes 1.5-2 hour meetings just to discuss simple issues. As a result, the President and VP are needed to finish their normal work as well as assign jobs and tasks to the other members so that work gets done and members are just sitting there playing games on the computers. VP and President, in the end, choose how much work they can handle for themselves. They can either give responsibility to a mentor who will then give out work or the Cabinet can interact and assign jobs themselves. Our VP tends give out jobs himself because he knows a bit about every subteam and is part of the design/CAD team. However, our President, due to other commitments, cannot always attend whole meetings. Thus, he has the VP take charge or gives the mentors the OK to assign jobs to members of their subteam. Our Treasurer tends to work by himself or has mentor help. Our Secretary works the same way as well. In Retrospect, I believe we should have given them more support rather than avoid them and leave them to their own devices. In Summary, our method has pros and cons.
Cons: Slow, Issues arise in who holds what power, Dependent on only a few people, Takes time to set up, Leaders can get a lot of flak for not listening to public opinion, whether it is right or wrong, and Can be hard to keep discipline during meetings.
Pros: Very much in the spirit of FIRST, Listens to everyone's opinion, Doesn't leave out individuals, and prevents mentors from doing all of the work since the students act as their own police force
In the end, I suggest the rookies and even older teams pick the type of government most suited to their needs. They must look at all of the factors such as number of mentors, students, competence, enthusiasm, location, and work ethic. Just one type of government can't work for them all, as Rookies we were lucky that our government is at least functional and has functioned enough for us to achieve the Rookie All Star Award.