After posting this, I got thinking, what do teams use to communicate? 
Discord seems more popular than I had assumed.
I’m looking to port FRCBot to some other platforms (it’s Slack-only right now), so if you have 3 seconds to spare, I’d love to see your response!
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Teams.
We used discord until it was banned by our school wifi, I find it much easier to follow and has faster loading times. Now we use slack.
We stuck with Facebook Messenger- highly dont recommend.
Also use Google Classroom mainly for long term announcements.
3468 currently uses Band for all “official” communications from the faculty mentors because of restrictions from the school. Unofficially we have a Discord that a couple of non-faculty mentors are on as well as the students.
4327 also uses Band
We’ve used Slack but haven’t updated to the premium subscription. Unfortunately our team seems to struggle with communicating on this service, much preferring in-person communication. I’ve personally (as a Slack “admin” I don’t really know what I am) seen a very disproportionate amount of activity from some very well linked in students and mentors as opposed to an unfortunately large number of accounts that seem to have been logged into once and left for dead.
I’m in a private discord with a few students from the team, we have tried to keep off-topic conversation there since we hit the 10k limit on Slack. It’s hard to communicate with people that are more familiar with Discord (some students) or not familiar with online messaging at all (some mentors) that there is a message limit and I do think we as a whole need to understand the value of threads. I don’t think they count towards the limit.
Anyway, yeah. This summer we need to figure out how to fix that. Switching platforms mid-season (even our fall “pre-season”) is a very bad idea.
Slack premium is free to non-profits and schools. There is a link somewhere to apply. Need school info I think like EIN and other business entity information.
Yes to non-profits, no to schools and school related programs. They do have an educational discount, but it is not free.
333 primarily uses a Facebook group, with a Discord for kids who aren’t on Facebook. It’s not ideal, but we’ve had a hard time getting everyone using the same platform and this is the best compromise we’ve been able to work out.
2791 uses Slack.
1257 used to use Slack until a recent school district policy change prohibited its use.
We mostly use Google Groups (email) for conversations since our district bans both Discord and Slack, but use Remind (on everyone’s phones) for announcements to make sure the whole team gets critical information in a timely manner.
I’m surprised by the number of email users, it can really hinder 2 way communication. Do most teams keep actual technical stuff in person and then just keep the administration to online platforms or do you share ideas on the online platform as well?
4009 uses Slack for the most part and email for files, due to school blocking file uploading or downloading.
A mentality we’ve been trying to have is making sure not just one person knows what’s going on.
Also, you guys seem to have way more authoritarian schools than us. Our school banned my DNS server with software that looks like it was last updated in 2008 and that’s the only time I’ve run into trouble with it.
For you (and everyone else)… you want to be careful with this sort of arrangement. When the administration finds out about the “unofficial” communication strategy, they could react poorly. Administrations put into place rules and restrictions around communications for several reasons, among them YPP. For that reason, we strive to always stay within the school’s rules, and it really is in the best interest of every team to do the same, as frustrating as it may be at times.
Technical != communication. We communicate via email. But we use Google Docs (Team drives in the school’s domain) for technical documentation, OnShape for CAD, Github for code. We communicate via email, but keep our technical, design, and implementation documentation elsewhere.
Instinctively, I feel like this really hinders communication because it raises the stakes of communication. Because email feels “more official,” I think new students would be a lot less likely to chime into any discussion.
Then again, discussions on my team’s slack and by old team’s discord were also largely dominated by a few voices. I wonder, how much does the platform of communication affect a new student’s willingness to participate?
Also, out of curiosity, what exactly does communication over email entail for your team? Is it mostly announcements, is it a lot of chit chat, or some mix?
The biggest issue that I have with email is that it’s not live. Emails can take a solid 20-30 seconds to get from Point A to Point B, so real-time communication is nearly impossible. Not to mention the fact that you can’t communicate in channels. 
We’ve been using a Slack alternative called Ryver which looked really promising back in 2016, but they’ve pretty much abandoned development so we’re currently in the process of moving to Slack.
We use Slack for just about everything. We also use Remind for full team alerts, really helpful because getting everybody to be active in checking Slack is hard.
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