Since we have a small group of students (being our second year), this may or may not be valid to you.
During summer 2013 after the competition, we branched out into marketing and research to get money for this season. Our school has a club fair every year around early October, and we set up a sign up thing. Many people signed up, but very little showed up to the orientation.
In the off season we did teambuilding exercises and see who fits in where. During these sessions it was mainly "build team" and "programming team".
We would have a sign up sheet for those interested in doing programming and those interested in doing build, and then we put them to work to see if they fit there.
Although nothing is set in stone, we have a good idea of who does what once build season begins.
Each team is consisted of a leader (upperclassman), a sub leader (freshman-sophomore), and at least one mentor.
The point of the upperclassman leader is to make sure everyone is on task.
The sub leader does a lot of the meaty work to get them prepared for the next season, where they can eventually take over once us upperclassman leave for college.
Each team's leader is supposed to communicate with each other a lot (although that hasn't been happening, kind of my fault) to provide information on what's to be built and programmed.
We also have a sign in sheet. It's to keep track of who's clocking in hours of work and who isn't. It also helps that our team is fairly small and we can easily keep track of who's working hard and who's hardly working. The hours clocked in will designate your eligibility to come to competition or not. Obviously team leaders and sub leaders are already guaranteed a spot because they are the ones holding the team together, but other than that the deciding factor on who attends or not will be determined by hours.
As you can see our team is very student run. Everything that was described was thought up by us, the students. The mentors provide their professional background when they see fit but for the most part they let us hit things with wrenches and see how long it takes for us to figure out that that's not how the wrench is supposed to be used. They are great mentors but they realize that it's not their job to build the robot which is great for us.
Quote:
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"FRC combines the excitement of sport with the rigors of science and technology. Under strict rules, limited resources, and time limits, teams of 25 students or more are challenged to raise funds, design a team "brand," hone teamwork skills, and build and program robots to perform prescribed tasks against a field of competitors. It’s as close to "real-world engineering" as a student can get."
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We keep this in mind whenever we do something. The people we have on the team is like the people you have to work with every day for 8 hours when you get a job. We have to run everything on our own because that's what it's like in the real world.