Slack?

[GeeTwo]

We started a slack group just before build season (Jan 4th?) and it's been the best comms the team has ever had. Most of the leads and mentors check it regularly, and a number of the rookies and underclassmen as well. In addition to general, robotbuild, programming, ordering_purchases, awards, fundraising, mentors, scouting, strategy and projectplanning, we have a random channel for chit-chat and maryellensplayhouse for stuff that's too random for random. And those are just the channels I monitor. The ability to set up one-on-one or small groups on the fly for PMs is great, too; we use these for ad-hoc groups like build details for each mechanism.

[pwnageNick]

Team NAR for VEXu uses it. It is really effective when all are on board. We used to just use a private Facebook group for our main communication but it got cluttered and clunky easily. The main issue we've had is making sure everyone actually posts to Slack and not the fb page when updating about something.

I guess that's just more of a transitional thing, but it's been tough for people to move on from the old communication system to the new. Overall though it's great, especially because it organizes well on mobile.

[synth3tk]

Not a team, but The Blue Alliance also has a Slack. It can't be overstated just how awesome the integrations are. GitHub, continuous integration, we've even recently set up daily and weekly Google Analytics stats!

I definitely recommend any teams on the fence to give it a try. It's free, too, so there's no cost to giving it a shot.

[phantomace]

Team 340 enjoys slack a ton. Having the ability to have multiple channels for each subteam is great, also having the ability to make certain channels private is very useful. After presenting it to your team you will notice problems with communication in your team quickly dissipate. I definitely recommend it!

[pyrtle]

Team 900 just started using Slack at the Palmetto Regional this weekend. We had a great first (ha, FIRST) experience with it, especially for communication between the pits and the stands. It let our scouters know what to expect when our robot was on the field, and kept the team updated with the changes being made to the bot. We were able to share match schedules, dinner times, meeting locations, etc. easily and almost instantaneously.

[TJolley]

Team 4020 has been using slack for the entire 2015-2016 season and so far we love it. Slack helped to replace google hangouts, group texts and massive email chains. I agree that the largest challenge was to get students to regularly check slack but after everyone downloaded the slack app to their phone checking slack was no longer an issue. The other problem that we had with slack is that the company that almost all of our mentors work for blocked the use of slack on there work network, but with the app installed on their phones this issue was resolved. Over all I would rank slack 8.5/10 stars


Thomas J
Operations Director
DB Cyber Tribe
Team 4020
www.DBCyberTribe.com