Team Event Planning (Team priority events)

[Restuta]

The Problem

Relatively big teams plan for their events and season just like most of the racers do. Currently information about "team priority" events is stored in a google spreadsheet and Facebook groups are used to distribute that. This presents a problem for racers since they have to double-check the spreadsheet every time they plan for their season and, presumably, this is too complicated and most racers wouldn't bother. So it may not be useful for majority at all.

Another problem that every team has to "invent" their own way of creating and maintaining team's calendar. Zoca and now SJBC are doing it with Facebook group, shared spreadsheets and manual remindings send by team director with Facebook polls "who is coming to which race" which are sent week before events. SJBC used to just use Yahoo Mailing list to figure this out. One of the best sources of that information is still BikeReg (excluding day-off regs).

Proposed Solution

• Use our Calendar (which may be the NCNCA Calendar) and allow to have a special role of a user "Team Director" or "Team manager" ("Manager" doesn't imply that it's only one person unlike "Director").
• Allow Team Manager to mark events as "Team Priority", so everybody who belongs to that team could see them marked in their calendar, give then logged in.
• Automatically put people in a Team based on data from USA Cycling or NCNCA (depending what is more accurate and easier to pull) (edit: so far it sounds like USA Cycling is easier)
  • [ ] decide when to do that. First time – at the time or registering, next time we need to sync it with real-life. (for simplicity can be manual process for now)
• Automatically remind people to update their status on "going" or "not going". Week before the event.
  • [ ] consider "maybe"
  • [ ] in what way to remind people about team priority event that is coming. SMS, Email, Post to FB group? (ideally both, team email and FB)
• Pull information from BikeReg showing who is pre-reg.

  Things to consider:

• how private this information is? I assume most teams will found it somewhat private, while as a racer I would like to see everybody's priorities openly, so we can plan for healthy competition. By default we should go with "private" and interview Team Directors on this topic.

[Restuta]

We also got a email from Erik Salander:

Here's a suggestion for your project. It would great if it had a "team" view to it. Does that make sense? Our club (Pen Velo Racing) uses a google doc with all the races and their available cats listed, then our racers sign up (add a row), so we know who is going to which race. Racers might want to know who "on their team" is going, more so than who "in the NCNCA" is going, or in addition to... Just a thought. Here's an example.

This is a great validation that this Feature makes sense.