Team handbooks are a great way to learn about how teams organize themselves.
FIRST links to top team handbooks on their website. They also have a page of
resources for new teams, which might help you guys with organization as well. Chief Delphi is also chock full of team handbooks, and posts about team organization if you dig around a little.
Even at the ripe old age of seven years, our team is still working on how we organize ourselves. As our team matures and develops new goals, and as our size and mentor number changes, we have to change our leadership to fit along with it. Our current team size is about 30 including all of our members, but there is always a small core group of very dedicated students. This happens on most teams.
Right now, our leadership structure is based off of a 5-person student management team with a President, Vice President, Community Liaison, Treasurer, and Secretary. These students organize the activities of the whole team, taking into account the input of all of the team members. Each has different responsibilities, but overall they control how the team interacts with students, families, mentors, sponsors, our school, our community, and other teams. You can read about these roles in
our team handbook (open the folder that says "Team Documents" and then click the link that says "Team Handbook 08-09" and it will open the Word document). We're expanding upon that for next year to give each role a subcommittee to help accomplish its goals, as our goals grow larger each year.
Students also organize themselves into subteams like mechanical, electrical, programming, strategy, documentation, spirit, community, etc. Usually subteams have their own mentor that supervises them, and students tend to take leadership roles upon themselves to organize the teams. We've tried structures like "declaring" a subteam in the past, and we're probably reorganizing the structure for subteams this year as well. There are many methods that can work, it depends on your team's philosophy and approach to
FIRST.
Having a solid system of organization that works for your team is important to keeping your team happy and successful. I'm glad to see you're doing your research to ensure a great next season. Good luck!