Team Contests?

We're always looking for new things to do and initiatives.  One of the things you would have to do is figure out how this would work as far as how to promote ahead of the time to arrange people to get in teams, how long the competition would last, etc.  Next, could it work within a competition or would it be something separate.   There's been some creative ways of doing this with students and Design Challenges in the past and there was also Join The micro:bit Summer Code Club Challenge! to get educators to introduce coding to their classroom and in The Great micro:bit Education Giveaway - Project Highlights you can see great collaboration between classrooms. 

Personally,  I'd love to see a collaborative Rube Goldberg Competition.   If we had this as a theme option,  how would the collaboration work, and would people be left out (which we don't want to do) if they aren't able to find a team.  Or, should this be treated as a separate animal all together, like the way we do the Birthday Special and the Holiday Special.   If this were a special event when would be the best time to hold the Collaborative Rube Goldberg Competition?

I think we could allow members to participate as individuals too, but to be honest, I don't think that anyone with enough motivation would have trouble finding other members to form a team.

Some members are concerned about logistics, but I don't think that would be much of a problem, as there is a lot of overlap in the access to the same test equipment and components. In the case of an item that just one member owns, I see the following solutions: The item could be bought (just like many items are bought to participate in current E14 contests), it could be replaced by an alternative (which is also a very good engineering exercise, as everything gets obsolete continuously and alternatives have to be found), or the member missing the item could just focus on a different part of the project.

If time-zones are too different to permit realtime communication between team members, you could always use email, github or any other non realtime system to coordinate development. Alternatively, if realtime communication is really fundamental to you, you can always team up with people of closer time-zones.

One important task in engineering is to solve problems with what one has at hand, I don't see how being distantly geographically separated would be such a big problem. This kind of contest would also allows us to exercise our abilities to work as part of a team, which completely different than working all alone. I think contests like these would allow us to practice other very important aspects of engineering!

I think we could allow members to participate as individuals too, but to be honest, I don't think that anyone with enough motivation would have trouble finding other members to form a team.

Some members are concerned about logistics, but I don't think that would be much of a problem, as there is a lot of overlap in the access to the same test equipment and components. In the case of an item that just one member owns, I see the following solutions: The item could be bought (just like many items are bought to participate in current E14 contests), it could be replaced by an alternative (which is also a very good engineering exercise, as everything gets obsolete continuously and alternatives have to be found), or the member missing the item could just focus on a different part of the project.

If time-zones are too different to permit realtime communication between team members, you could always use email, github or any other non realtime system to coordinate development. Alternatively, if realtime communication is really fundamental to you, you can always team up with people of closer time-zones.

One important task in engineering is to solve problems with what one has at hand, I don't see how being distantly geographically separated would be such a big problem. This kind of contest would also allows us to exercise our abilities to work as part of a team, which completely different than working all alone. I think contests like these would allow us to practice other very important aspects of engineering!