paper: Friarbots Team 3309 Handbook

[dcarr]

Thread created automatically to discuss a document in CD-Media.

Friarbots Team 3309 Handbook by dcarr

[dcarr]

For the latest up to date version with a click-able table of contents and links, please go here:

http://goo.gl/JpcT7

Let us know if this helps! How would you make it better? How can we make it better?

[Jim Wilks]

Nice work!

[Jimmy Nichols]

Great Handbook! Lots of information.

My only advise, coming from someone who has been responsible for maintaining and forming committees for annual review and revision of our team handbook, is to break it apart. There seems to be more information in it than what you would need in a handbook. I could see you breaking it apart into seperate handbooks for parents, Enginneering, etc. I think it would make it more managable for maintaining, as well as distributing and actually getting folks to read what you want them to read.

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Nichols

Great Handbook! Lots of information.

My only advise, coming from someone who has been responsible for maintaining and forming committees for annual review and revision of our team handbook, is to break it apart. There seems to be more information in it than what you would need in a handbook. I could see you breaking it apart into seperate handbooks for parents, Enginneering, etc. I think it would make it more managable for maintaining, as well as distributing and actually getting folks to read what you want them to read.

Thanks, I think that is a useful idea. We've just started on another reference document containing the roles and responsibilities of our team "admins" (president and vice presidents) and NEM's, and since that will contain a lot of detail that not everyone needs to see, we're doing it as a separate handbook.

One thing I've realized, being a former president of our team, and seeing my brother be president now, is that so much of the operations, deadlines, and responsibilities are in our collective "brain trust." Therefore the importance of clearly documenting each and every thing to empower future leaders to be even more successful cannot be overstated.

[jessss]

This is fantastic! Our team was planning on making a team handbook this year so this is really helpful for us. Thank you for posting this

[Jim Wilks]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Nichols

My only advise, coming from someone who has been responsible for maintaining and forming committees for annual review and revision of our team handbook, is to break it apart. There seems to be more information in it than what you would need in a handbook. I could see you breaking it apart into seperate handbooks for parents, Enginneering, etc. I think it would make it more managable for maintaining, as well as distributing and actually getting folks to read what you want them to read.

Be careful if you go this way. Once your material is spread out over many documents, it's a major task to keep everything "coordinated". A change here may affect something else there, etc. etc.

[Jimmy Nichols]

Originally Posted by Jim Wilks

Be careful if you go this way. Once your material is spread out over many documents, it's a major task to keep everything "coordinated". A change here may affect something else there, etc. etc.

Agreed. We only have less than a handful of documents and when one reference's the other, its a more broad reference vs. detail page callouts, etc.

Originally Posted by dcarr

...so much of the operations, deadlines, and responsibilities are in our collective "brain trust."

We have the same structure, except we call our brain trust the Leadership Council.

[tr6scott]

Thanks for sharing,

Can I ask what do you use to manage your email distribution lists? I am trying to get something working for our team.

Scott.

[Jimmy Nichols]

Originally Posted by tr6scott

Thanks for sharing,

Can I ask what do you use to manage your email distribution lists? I am trying to get something working for our team.

Scott.

We use gmail. organizes contact distribution lists very well and makes it easy to send out emails to a mass number of people.

[Phyrxes]

We also use Google groups to manage our e-mail distribution, when a student joins the team we ask for their e-mail and their parents e-mail(s) so we can add them to the group. Its been our experience though that our students are not the most reliable about checking e-mail so our student leadership uses a variety of social media outlets as well, this is due to our school system's restriction on staff interacting with students on social media.

[tr6scott]

Ok, Thanks we have a gmail account, but I can't figure out how to get this working, I will do some more research.

[Jimmy Nichols]

You can also use gmail to mass text. You first create a google voice number and have texts set-up to forward to your email, then you have everyone text the number. The text shows up as a google generated email/text address. Create another distribution list and you can send mass texts to students, parents, mentors, etc.

Our students admin the facebook groups.

[dcarr]

We use Google Apps with our domain @serviterobotics.org to manage the email lists - in the future, we might consider switching to a more capable system that would allow individuals to manage their own subscription status, but it works well enough for now (incidentally, we switched our website domain to www.team3309.org now that we're a Tri-school team, but we have yet to switch all of our emails to the new domain since that's a bigger hurdle).

The mass-texting idea sounds really appealing, thanks for that idea!

We also use a Facebook Group in addition to our public-facing Page, but that's more for casual discussion and posts and not for critical announcements - shockingly, there still are some students who aren't on Facebook (or aren't on often) and they would miss important information delivered that way.