Back The Green Alliance: New long term project in the works
Yes, the name's ripped off from the Blue Alliance, but I promise you it's a completely different app that will really help teams out
4/17/2025
A problem our FRC team has faced, being a community team, is coordination. It's really hard to plan out meetings, carpooling, attendance, and tasks when your team is 1. severely over-budget and 2. from all over the county. While our team is based in Edison, NJ, we have many members that live all around the Middlesex County area, and it's hard for many to know exactly when a meeting, if even happening, is going to happen, and even harder for people to try and get rides for what can often be a 30+ minute journey one-way.
It's been hard, setting up attendance records for our team. In our early days, we weren't really aware of any good solution that could help us manage our hours, so our solution was a web app on our website that would send a discord message that you were present on this day. It was not a perfect solution, and a lot of people would either forget to open up the website, or would go to a different room before they filled out attendance.
It's been pretty hard getting people's records in place as well. Throughout the season, all we've had in terms of finance record-keeping, inventory, and resource management is a Google sheet. The google sheet isn't updated with the most recent information, and a lot of information gets lost in communication between phone calls or the constant stream of messages that we have.
It's obvious there needs to be a better solution. A more connected solution. A solution that can manage all the problems our team has with coordination, while also maintaining a flexible system that allows for each team's needs to be met. An application that coordinates attendance, carpooling, task management, announcement propagating to people who might not check a social media platforms all that often, finances, inventory, roster, and to top it off, a team calendar, team specific resources, and the ability for team members to request emails to be sent through the official team email.
If a solution like this does actually exist, I'm yet to find it (in which case please email me with that solution), but in the meanwhile, I'll take this into my own hands. My friend, Eli Nahoum, and I, will be working on this application, and I will update on the progress of this app here.
Why'd you rip off The Blue Alliance's naming scheme?
Because the most important alliance is the one formed within a team. That eliminated the name "The Red Alliance", and also my favourite colour is green so might as well. Back