After talking to a close friend of mine about the way her new team worked, I was wondering about this topic. I know it might have been discussed before, but I haven’t posted or looked closely in awhile. How are your teams actually governed?
Personally, team 422 is a direct democracy. We have 4 committee heads that take responsibility for Communications, Ways and Means, Administrative business, and Project Management. I, personally, am Communications officer. However, when I say we are officers, I don’t mean that we make decisions for the team. All our duties consist of raising official issues, giving the floor to various members of the team, and having everyone vote. I realize this may not work for teams much larger than 30 or so, but it works extraordinarily well for us, since the entire team speaks on what we want and we normally get it. Also, we don’t have handed-down leadership; elections every year, with everything being run by vote (including nominations). Therefore, the best man for the job gets picked (or the one who showed most conviction the previous year).
Hmm… my team is based around a concept of complete chaos. We find it works just fine. It’s all a matter of people getting along, if somthing needs to get done, we just do it… if it dosn’t need to get done, we do it anyways.
This isn’t to say we dont ‘vote’ on anythi9ng while designing or making big decisions we do run somewhat like a democracy, we bring up opinions and vote on them. We don’t however form committiees to do things, we just aren’t that big i guess (if we have 4 committiees each one would have a average of 3 active members on it).
Just my thoughts, this kind of a system works very well for a small team of people who get along, i dont mean to promote it for everyone
My team last year was much the same way as yours, Greg. We sorta went with the flow and everyone got their opinion in, on most things. There was one group who didn’t let anyone near them until they needed help, needeless to say they left the team. We had 5 active student members so everyone worked on everything. What no one else wanted to do, I did. For the most part it worked well. The problems we ran into came on the end of oblivious, adult members of the team.
same with the rambots. we actually had only like 4 or 5 really active members, about the same number of pretty active, and then 5 or 6 people who thought they were really active cuz they showed up 2 times a week for 20 minutes. the other 25 people on the team came about the same as them, but knew that they werent real active. and when it came to doing stuff, we had everyone present vote and did that. we ran into some problems at the beginning choosing what design to make, but thats a long story…
*Originally posted by mike o’leary *
**same with the rambots. we actually had only like 4 or 5 really active members, about the same number of pretty active, and then 5 or 6 people who thought they were really active cuz they showed up 2 times a week for 20 minutes. the other 25 people on the team came about the same as them, but knew that they werent real active. **
At least you had that many people interested enough to show some effort. We had five students, 2 college students, and 4 mentors that did stuff. The other 3 people who showed up were there for food once a month, if that.
those people who were sorta interested…well they referred to the whole thing as ‘florida club’. nats was the absolute only reason they joined. when we went to utc…they immediately left the place and wandered around hartford all day. they didnt go to a single match at nats, as far as i know…
we denied the travel to florida for kids who didn’t show up enough. they could not travel with us eventhough they paid all their money that was Non Refundable. They didn’t deserve to go because they didn’t put in the hard work that everyone else put forward.
we considered doing that but by then wed payed for rooms and airfare and everything already so we figured we might as well put it to use. plus the teacher guy who ran the team showed up less then the florida club kids so he really didn tknow
Somehow my team ended up bringing people who didn’t do ANYTHING AT ALL for the robot. I don’t know how it happened, but on the trip there they were trying to tell us how to fix OUR robot
The day before we left i was spinning a part for our cart and one of them tried to tell me to use a file instead of the cutting tool i was using… yeah sure, I was gonna take the extra 30 mins to make my carts SHAFT of the highest quality… the cart itself was made of angle iron and plywood.
The way my team looked at it was that those few people just lowered the travel costs for the rest of us (they were split).
In my experiences with FIRST (4 years spread over 2 teams), democracy most definately does not work. It caused all sorts of problems and missteps. The system that seems to work best is a benevolent dictatorship. Someone’s in charge and their rulings are what everyone goes by. The main problem with democracies is a lot of people don’t know enough to make an informed decision and that just hurts the process.
My team is in the preliminary stages of setting up various groups, which makes life somewhat difficult at times. People need to find the person in charge at times only to find out that there really isn’t one. Feelings can get hurt too, so its a really sticky situation at times. Designs no longer become the team’s design 1 and 2, but rather “Bob’s design” or “Joe’s design” (not the real names, of course). Last year this division between the teams made our design phase run WAY longer than it should have been, and cost us a few features on our bot. This year though I think things are going to be much firmer as for people’s roles and positions on the team.
~Tom~, who had fun inspite of it all
P.S. Couldn’t agree more with the comment of democracy not working. Way too much red tape for 6 weeks worth of building. Not to mention that means that the free-loaders, or florida club memebers as others have called them, have equal say.
Since we’re trying to teach students about science and engineering, we want them to know what it’s like to be an engineer. We run the team like a corporation. There’s a leader for the whole team, and one leader for all of engineering and another for everything else. Then we have engineers in charge of each team (mechanical, electrical, software, web, marketing, finance, strategy, etc) and student leaders for each team. Like a corporation, the the team leaders are responsible for getting their work done and must report their status to the engineering/other leader.
I can only speak for the software teams because that’s what I worked on, but this system worked out well. We got our requirements from the mechanical and electrical teams and went from there. The team leaders took charge of the high level design (with input from the students) and let the students do the actual coding (with help from the engineers), much like a senior engineer and someone who works for him. The students got exposure to the design process and got a lot of hands on experience with the code. The organization of our team also helps new engineers (like myself) get experience with high level design and management.
The first year we had no clue what we were doing, so it was “do whatever it takes!” The second year, we had so many kids come out for the team that I decided to weed out those that wanted to just travel. So, I had the engineers from our team interview each student. The students had to fill out a one-page application, write a cover letter, get three teacher recommendations, then go through the interview. Just because of the process, I lost 25 kids! They were too lazy to go through it. The students had to decide what team they wanted on and interview for that position. We have the chairman’s award team, the animation team, and the manufacturing team. This year I will add the CAD team. I also have a team captain…and that is predetermined. (We pick a senior that has put in a lot of time and will be willing to do a LOT of public speaking with me.)
This organizational method has been great! Everyone knows what they need to do and they do it. Once they are on a specific team. they can pretty much run with the ideas they have. (We are not a real strict team by any means!)
*Originally posted by Libby Ritchie *
**I also have a team captain…and that is predetermined. (We pick a senior that has put in a lot of time and will be willing to do a LOT of public speaking with me.)
This organizational method has been great! Everyone knows what they need to do and they do it. Once they are on a specific team. they can pretty much run with the ideas they have. (We are not a real strict team by any means!) **
i’m a better team captain than yours. i’m also a VERY good public speaker:p
while designing or making big decisions we do run somewhat like a democracy, we bring up opinions and vote on them. We don’t however form committiees to do things, we just aren’t that big i guess (if we have 4 committiees each one would have a average of 3 active members on it).