Team Governance

[aaeamdar]

Dear FIRST/CD Community,

Our team is wrapping up our first year, and we've had some great successes. Our robot, while not being the superstar that we would've liked (it never is), was quite successful. We won the rookie all-star award at Annapolis. I'm saying this not to brag, but to give some idea of what our current background is.

However, we have run into uncertainties about who exactly should be running our team - who should be making decisions such as who does programming, who is the driver, and what versions of code to load onto the robot.

Our setup this year has been essentially to have adult mentors (namely our Project Manager) making all of the important decisions, including whether our robot would be a corner scorer or a high shooter. Our Project Manager has had final say in who works on what and what changes (if any) were made to the robot. Sometimes his decisions have been in conflict with what a significant portion of the students wanted, but most of the time everyone has agreed. One issue that we had was that this wasn't really spelled out in our team handbook.

We're planning to hit the ground running after Atlanta and come up with a plan to organize our team that is clear to everyone and hopefully workable for all concerned.

What I wanted to do in the meantime is to ask you guys how your teams are run. How does the broader FIRST community handle issues of team governance and how would you like it handled?

I encourage everyone to respond not only by answering the poll but by responding in this thread.

Thanks,
Paul Dennis
Team 1719