Team Communication Solutions

[jest] FIRST gives out awards for acting like a business, so act like a business: Fire employees who don't respond or read their emails. [/jest]

With all seriousness, part of being a part of a team is being in the loop. If your members aren't checking their mail, they'll need to learn this habit eventually. Help them with it.

[Radical Pi]

We keep 2 mailing lists: parents and students. We also have weekly team meetings that the general rule is to attend unless you have a good reason not to.

We also see most of our team around school, so even if someone doesn't catch the e-mail there's a good chance they'll hear it somehow from other members

[Trent B]

Originally Posted by CraigHickman

[jest] FIRST gives out awards for acting like a business, so act like a business: Fire employees who don't respond or read their emails. [/jest]

With all seriousness, part of being a part of a team is being in the loop. If your members aren't checking their mail, they'll need to learn this habit eventually. Help them with it.

I am tempted to implement your "jest" method of conducting the team. I think part of the problem this year was the team emails, personal probably would have been better but even then I find that high school students seem to check their emails very sparsely. Keehun and I have been trying to find a solution because we are anomalies as my email app is running as long as my computer is so I get all emails within 5 minutes of them being sent if I am on (send receive time)

I am thinking maybe next year if the majority of people have texting we send them a personal email, then possibly send them all a text saying please check your email.

The forum this year pretty much was only alive pre build season and then died, we are trying to find a good means of communicating next year, which I think maybe we should stick with a forum just not have it tied into email accounts like we did this year.

We have also been looking at 37signals "Basecamp" has anyone used this product before?

[Foster]

[jest] FIRST gives out awards for acting like a business, so act like a business: Fire employees who don't respond or read their emails. [/jest]

With all seriousness, part of being a part of a team is being in the loop. If your members aren't checking their mail, they'll need to learn this habit eventually. Help them with it.

Originally Posted by Jared341

We have a team forum on our website, as well as an email list. Part of your responsibility as a team member is to regularly (daily) check your email and/or the forum for important announcements.

I'm pretty much with these two posts. I'm not interested in doing postal mail, tweeting, Myspacing, IMing, Facebooking, telepathy, calling on their cell phone or skywriting just for a roboteer that can't be bothered to look at the website for important info once a day.

It's their job to know what's going on, they need to make an effort to find it out. If they can't be bothered then tough.

This is number one on my peeve list. I had a person that insisted, and was very vocal about me sending them an email for every update. I put them on ''monitor this page'' on the wiki where announcements are made. Page gets updated they get an email saying "New changes on the Announcement page. " Problem solved!

[MasterRobot]

Originally Posted by Trent B

We have also been looking at 37signals "Basecamp" has anyone used this product before?

I've used some of 37 signal's products, and they do work very nicely and are quite professional. You may want to look at other solutions that might be free (we use google groups, and were using a project plan based off of Google Docs + Google Forms), but from what I've heard and seen, Basecamp is actually fairly comprehensive in project planning, discussions etc. If you're willing to pay per month, and can make sure students use and check it, it looks like it is a good system to use.