We are a rookie team (team 4069), and we are running into some bottlenecks with documents and photos. For example, a person who wants a picture from particular member, his works stops until the member emails the photo. This issues rises when it comes done to documents too.
We are planning to use Google docs for the documents, and flickr or some other photo sharing service. However flickr and others have lot of limitations: size, quality, etc. I wanted to know what other teams are doing to overcome these problems.
Google Docs is a great resource. My team has been using it for the past couple years for important documents that need to be seen or edited by multiple people. ex. Chairman’s award essay, hotel room arrangments, build schedule etc. Google docs is also very helpful since it works through google’s server it works no matter what browser or operating system the other person is using.
For Pictures we mostly use email, but I understand how a flicker account could be effective.
I’m not sure how large your programming team is but another great resource from Google is Google Code . We use Google Code as a way for members to be able to access the code from home. Though if you want to you use google code you will want to make sure you are using some type of version control. We use Tortoise SVN.
First off, congratulations on starting a FIRST Team!
My fellow programmers and I have had a similar problem of not having code when another needs it. You can try dropbox, which is a free cloud storage website. It allows you to store files on the cloud like google docs, but stores any file type. It’s free unless you wish to purchase more than the free 2 Gigabytes. Although the simplest solution is to have everyone save on their flash drive.
And if the problem is that someone doesn’t have something to do because their work depends on someone else, there’s always something to do for a robotics team. Have them organize some tools or practice skills. There is always work for FIRST members to do!
