Team Communication

[Rachel Lim]

Originally Posted by penguin4130

1) What does your team use for communication?

2) How does it work for your team?

Google Groups for emails, Sites for an internal site (links to event information, signups, etc.), Docs/Sheets for collecting data or any collaborative work, and Forms for voting that happens outside meetings or to collect responses.

It works pretty well. I wouldn't consider any of them the best available product in their area (e.g. the lack of formatting options in Docs is difficult after being used to Word), but the ease to link all of them is great. In generally they're pretty easy to figure out, many people are already familiar with them, and the ability to work on the same document at the same time is great. Groups is nothing special, but it's an easy way to set up an email group. There can be some minor issues if you don't use a gmail account, but since most of our team does, in general it's okay.

They're also all free, which is a huge plus.

Originally Posted by penguin4130

Our team has trouble getting people to reply to emails.

How do you get your team to always reply, especially in the "Off-season"?

At some point we assume not everyone does. It's almost impossible to get a reply from everyone. We try to set a deadline and then just go with whatever responses we have at that point. In some cases, we'll directly email whoever it is that we need an answer from, but most of the time, it's "if you don't respond, your opinion doesn't get counted."

[sanddrag]

I also use remind to text students. It works very well.

[penguin4130]

Originally Posted by Rachel Lim

At some point we assume not everyone does. It's almost impossible to get a reply from everyone. We try to set a deadline and then just go with whatever responses we have at that point. In some cases, we'll directly email whoever it is that we need an answer from, but most of the time, it's "if you don't respond, your opinion doesn't get counted."

We send out the emails for events like two months in advance, but don't get any replies until like the week before or of the actual event.

The mentors on our team have never wanted to try a deadline. Everyone never uses direct wording, they always try to not "offend" people.(I can't think of the correct words to use.) We've tried emailing directly and that never works either.

[MariOlsen]

Our team struggled with the email thing too. For a while I was texting people to check their email after a particularly important one was sent out until they got into the habit of checking their email on their own.

Since our team was relatively small and split between 2 or 3 sites each Saturday, we created a GroupMe about halfway through build season which was an enormous help with reminders to check email and last minute changes of plan (except the mentors weren't on it, which did cause a couple issues). GroupMe is also extremely useful at competitions for communicating between the pit and the stands to organize lunch and so on, but it can quickly turn to spamming and it's useless once people turn off notifications because they're sick of the spam.

[KPSch]

Last summer some of our students and programming mentors developed our own team communication system. It sends out SMS text messages and emails to students, mentors, parents, and alumni. Team leaders can designate groups or individuals to receive messages and can even schedule messages to go out at a future time (like first thing the next morning).

The system was designed to host communications for more than one organization on the same server and keep them separate. Our team plans to offer to host for other teams and even outside organizations like scout troops or church groups.

We also plan to publish the source code so other teams or organizations can contribute or even host their own system. We plan to post a new thread to CD soon with more details and link to the source code.

[Brian Maher]

Team 1257 uses Slack. It allows us to set up chat channels for sub teams and projects, and have private group/direct messages. The built in sharing is really convenient.

[astro70]

We use https://wiggio.com/ as a customizable listserv and free education account with http://www.wikispaces.com/ as an easy website to post schedules, updates, files, directions, etc. Instead of remind for text messages, we will try to use these with a special wiggio list when we need to send texts via the email listserv - http://www.emailtextmessages.com/. Slack looks useful too - more things to try!