Google Apps for FIRST?

FIRST General Forum
1

While our team has developed a website for our ***FRC***® team we want to expand the capabilities to meet the needs of the ***FIRST***® program (***FLL***® and ***FRC***®). We need a web based solution for communication, documentation, collaboration, web site, and source code management and it seems that Google Apps would fit the bill nicely.

Furthermore many ***FIRST***® Robotics teams would benefit greatly by using Google Apps but there are barriers.
Google Apps for Education is used by many school districts but its use is restricted to administration, faculty, and students.
*Google Apps for Non-Profits *is restricted to use by 501©(3) organizations.

Many of the FRC teams are school sponsored (not 501©(3)) and in addition to students and faculty, team members include parents, mentors, and business people from multiple sponsors. As a result FRC teams fall in between the two app groups Google has established.

How can we propose the establishment of Google Apps for ***FIRST***® ?
Contacting a human at Google is extremely difficult due to their communication process. My attempts to contact Google have met with silence. When I requested that the ***FIRST***® National organization contact Google they came up empty as well.

Does someone have a way to send email to Dr. Eric Schmidt (Google CEO and member of the ***FIRST***® board)?
Can a ***FIRST***® mentor who works at Google and contact someone in Google’s Corporate Responsibility organization?

Google Apps for ***FIRST***® could provide huge benefits to ***FLL***® and ***FRC***® teams.

Does this make sense to others?

2

My team was able to get Google Apps for Education enabled for our site with no trouble, just took a few days after submitting the form. Our high school was already approved for Google Apps, if that makes a difference.

3

Hmm. Makes me wonder how to do this.
Our district has Google Apps for Education (fairport.org) but it is a closed environment open only to students, faculty, and administration (i.e. not accessible by parents or mentors).

Team 578 would like to use Google Apps for Education for our domain fairportfirst.com and manage it separately from the district. It seemed that the form to fill out wanted school district information that was not applicable to the FRC team.

Maybe I’ll try it using the team’s domain name and see what happens.

Thanks for the info.

4

How are these google apps different from the google applications available to students/mentors right now?

  • Sunny G.
5

This is what we do. I don’t recall exactly how I filled out the form, but I’m sure I used our domain and included the name of the high school that had already been approved for Google Apps.

Not sure what you’re referring to. To clarify, Google Apps for Education is a service that lets organizations use Google accounts and all associated services with their own domain name. It adds a host of management and configuration tools for domain administrators.

6

IMO Google Apps for Education is more than gmail and docs. It allows you to build and manage a community specific to a domain.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/products.html

Our team has been using a hosted service with Joomla and some plugins to manage a users, mailing lists, documents, and website but it has been clumsy at best.

7

We are currently using the free edition of Google apps that allows for up to ten users. This service is no longer offered for new Google apps users. I really want to be able to add more users and sign up for the educational version as a FIRST Robotics team (that is not a 501c3). If anyone has found a way to do this, I would love to know!

8

If you’re associated with a school that is approved for Google Apps for Education, then you should be eligible to use it on your team’s domain, as we were.

I use the now-discontinued free Google Apps on my personal domain and I absolutely love it (I got in early when you got 50 accounts :))

9

I got the TechnoKats set up with the “Google Apps For Your Domain” product early on. We somehow were granted an extended user limit, and there have been more than 50 users at various times. It used to be a lot easier to administer, but recently there have been some security-related changes that keep me from setting up email forwarding for the users. The limited functionality of domain “groups” is also a source of mild irritation for me.

I started to look into the “For Education” variety a few years ago, but got held up by not being a member of the school faculty.

10

I think everyone who got in before December of 2012 (If my memory serves), is grandfathered in to the original with no restrictions

11

Definitely still possible to use email forwarding with the grandfathered free Google Apps accounts (or at least I currently have it set up w/ that on my personal domain)

12

I didn’t mean to imply that forwarding was not possible. The users can certainly do it individually. I just can’t do it for them.

13

Our team uses a “secret” Facebook group for major communications. We upload files, pictures, cad screenshots, test videos and have design discussions through our page. Since practically everyone is on Facebook anyway, and all the infrastructure is already in place (apps, push notifications, convenience) it is a good way for our team to connect outside of meetings (though our phones blow up in the weekend of kickoff).

14

Thanks for all the feedback.
Some additional digging on Google Apps uncovered this page: Qualifications for Google Apps for Education so I will continue seeking an alternative.

15

It’s been a couple of years, just wondering if anyone else has solved this riddle?

16

Not much of a riddle.

  1. Work with your host school district to get access to Google Apps for Education, or

  2. Form a 501©(3) booster club, and apply as a nonprofit organization.

Note that the latter also qualifies you for free Office 365 subscriptions from Microsoft, which has a different set of features and might be more what you want.

17

Team 2543, TitanBot, recently went through the process of getting Google Apps for our organization. It was a little difficult, but I’m hope our experience can help others looking to take advantage of these great tools.

Google has a service called Google Apps for Business that they offer Gmail and Google Drive along with a whole bunch of little tools that help businesses stay organized. Google offers the same service to nonprofits free of cost. The requirements are listed below.

[LIST=3]
[li]To be eligible for the Google for Nonprofits program, organizations must:
[/li][ul]
[li]Hold current 501©(3) status, as determined by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service; and
[/li][li]Acknowledge and agree to the application’s required certifications regarding nondiscrimination and donation receipt and use.
[/li][/ul]
[li]Please note that the following organizations are not eligible for Google for Nonprofits:
[/li][ul]
[li]Governmental entities and organizations;
[/li][li]Hospitals and health care organizations;
[/li][li] Schools, childcare centers, academic institutions, and universities (philanthropic arms of educational organizations are eligible). To learn more about Google’s programs for educational institutions, visit Google in Education.
[/li][/ul]
[li]Google reserves the right to grant or deny an organization’s application or participation at any time, for any reason, and to supplement or amend these eligibility guidelines at any time. Selections are made at Google’s sole discretion, and are not subject to external review.
[/li][/LIST]

When you get approved, you qualify for various Google products that you can read up on here http://www.google.com/nonprofits/products/

So our team applied at was quickly denied (within a few seconds). The reason being is our organizations classification for the IRS is a “Educational Institutions and Related Activities”. Google automatically took this as being a school so we did not qualify for the program. It was an automated response. Google offers the Google Apps for Education, but you can’t take advantage of the other services offered [here](Educational Institutions and Related Activities). We also aren’t a school so we don’t qualify. We took our chances and tried. The next day we got a response from a fellow at Google stating that we do not qualify because we did not meet this requirement “K-12 or higher educational institution, non-profit, accredited by a generally accepted accreditation body” One thing different when we were rejected this time was that it was a personalized response. We decided to once again try our chances and explain the situation we were in because of the way the IRS classifies us. The nice guy at google understood our situation, asked for our EIN, and approved our Google Apps account. So we have a Google Apps for Education account now. Some notable things about this is that you get unlimited users and unlimited drive space. This has been a tremendous help to our team and we use Google drive for just about everything we make and every student has their own account. Where we would previously have binders full of documentation, we now have it all in the cloud and easily accessible.

I hope this can help some teams out there trying to take advantage of these resources. I would try for Google Apps for nonprofits first because it also opens the options to use the other services google offers for nonprofits.

18

I’d really like to see a formal FIRST / Google partnership to provide this to teams.

19

I would really like to see this as well. This would be an AMAZING addition to our already large suite of software that makes being a FIRST team a lot easier from many standpoints.

<edit>Sidenote: being that Microsoft already provides windows for all of the classmates etc, do you think that it would be easier to get Office 365? IMO, 365 is almost better than Google Apps.</edit>