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Originally Posted by joecloud
I understand your frustrations, although I will be a Junior in the fall- We've had similar issues with inconsistencies with attendance and communication. I think it's important that for a team to be successful, everyone needs to be involved- I fell into a similar trap of signing up but only showing up once-twice before build season was about done. And the main reason I actually started coming was because there was a need for an assistant programmer, and I helped even without much knowledge of Labview, but anyways..
For one, I'm not sure how the 'politics' work in your team, but ours is divided up into leaders for each group type: build, programming, marketing etc.. And each of these leaders has 1+ assistants who that work directly with the group leaders to accomplish tasks related to their 'field'. We're implementing this for next year, and I think that this will help keep those new students, or members- who aren't directly connected to any group when they first walk into the lab, but have skills that a robotics team could really use.
Also, as for your communications issues- We're using something called Remind101, from what I understand, the coach uses a program that sends a mass text to all members of robotics group, I think this is much more effective than relying on email- since most teenagers these days are glued to their phones at all times- there aren't really any excuses for not responding to the notifications.
Hope this helps,
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Our team is run by a student government. Each member of the government is responsible for a few different aspects of the team, such as the CEO is the overseer of Chairman's Award submissions and anything concerning the team's future (like proposing new amendments for the government's policies), or how the president is in charge of public relations and team image. We have a total of 7 governmental positions, covering every function of the team. Under each of those departmental leaders, other students can freely switch between tasks and departments, usually depending on where they're most needed at the moment. Each week, the student government holds a private meeting to discuss where each department is at in its tasks, then a whole team meeting is conducted to update everyone on what still needs to get done. Generally speaking, the members of the government work alongside/directly with other members, as you mentioned with your team's system. That being said, I still found as president that there were always some tasks that people refused to do, like making posters or contacting sponsors, even if I was also doing that task by myself.
We implemented the government to remove some of the managerial burdens from our coach; if students were overseeing students, he wouldn't have to constantly jump from department to department just urging people to get involved when he's already bogged down with his own tasks. Even with this system, we still need him to encourage students and stress the urgency of getting certain tasks done in time.
That's actually a really cool program -- I didn't even know that existed! I'll definitely tell our coach about it. Thanks!
