How should leaders be selected?

[vhcook]

In the past, we used a variety of methods to choose leaders. Last year at the end of season party, we asked the students to vote on whether they would like to elect their leaders or whether they wanted a dictatorship (i.e. mentor selected leaders). They almost unanimously voted for dictatorship because it meant they didn't have to worry about the popularity contest problem.

The way this played out is that we asked for applications in the fall from students who wanted a leadership role, making it clear that they were expected to have robotics as their primary extracurricular activity during build season. Our lead mentor assigned the roles, after some consultation with the other mentors. I think it's worked out pretty well.