SR2024-05: Initial newsletter

SR2024/2023-11-05-srawn-05.md

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+The Student Robotics (Almost) Weekly Newsletter is a (roughly) fortnightly newsletter which summarises the goings‐on across Student Robotics. **Emboldened** items are ones for which additional help has been requested.
+
+## The Competition Team Needs You!
+
+As we gear up for the competition we're once again looking at assigning Area Owners and Deputies. To help us organise the competition, we've split up the necessary tasks into different areas each with an Owner and Deputies. They are responsible for ensuring tasks are completed (not necessarily doing all the tasks on their own!). We have Owners for each of the areas, listed below, and are looking for people that may be interested in becoming a Deputy.
+
+| Area | Owner | Deputies   |
+|-----------------|----------------|----------|
+| Health & Safety | Scarzy         |          |
+| Marketing Liasson   | James          |          |
+| Mentoring       | Andy Busse     |          |
+| Teams           | Jake           | Peter    |
+| Kit Liason             | Will           |          |
+| Event logistics | Will           | James    |
+| Livestreaming   | Anton          |          |
+| Production      | Jake           |          |
+| Game            | Alistair       |          |
+| Volunteer       | Andy B-S       | Antoine  |
+| Simulator       | Peter          |          |
+
+**If you're interested in getting stuck in, or want to know more about what the role of a deputy entails, just reach out in [#competition-team](https://studentrobotics.slack.com/archives/CBP7UL6RG) in Slack**
+
+## Buddies for new volunteers
+
+With a bunch of new volunteers joining us over the past couple of months, we'd like to pair up new volunteers with more experienced volunteers (buddies) to get them familiar with what we're up to.
+
+The role of a buddy is to:
+- Welcome new volunteers to attend their first meeting and give an introduction to what the team is up to
+- Have an initial video call before the meeting to bring the new volunteer up to speed and to give them a friendly face of someone in the meeting
+- Make the new volunteer aware of upcoming in-person events
+- Contact them approximately once a month to check in
+- Answer questions the new volunteer may have, where possible
+
+**If you're interested in becoming a buddy, please [sign up here](https://forms.gle/cVpcHgPBf1fFKQVR7)!**
+
+## Mentoring
+
+With the competition well underway, we aim to aim to provide support to teams in many different ways. One of the most beneficial to teams is to have a volunteer mentor visit them on a regular basis.
+
+Mentoring is an opportunity for you to get to know a team and to grow your communication and team working skills, as well as help them improve their robot.
+
+The role of a mentor is to guide a team towards good solutions for their robot, provide assistance where they might need it as well as help them understand the kit, the rules and the competition as a whole. This doesn't mean that you need to know everything about these yourself (it's completely fine not to know things!), rather you will guide them towards finding the information for themselves.
+
+The team will always be supervised by their team leader (usually a teacher), so you can focus on supporting them with their robot.
+
+We have some guidance for mentors at https://studentrobotics.org/runbook/volunteering/mentor-guidance/. If you've not mentored a team before we're very happy to support you in doing so, if you like you can be paired with another mentor who has more experience.
+
+**If you're interested in becoming a mentor, please [sign up](https://forms.gle/pigzfQ9LGZvrmjMu6)!**
+
+## Horsham November Tech Day a Success
+
+A huge thank you to everyone who attended the Horsham Tech Day, the event was a great success with both teams in attendance making a huge amount of progress! There's still time to sign up to help out at our upcoming tech days if you haven't already.
+
+- 9th December - [Southampton (University of Southampton)](https://studentrobotics.org/events/sr2024/southampton-tech-day-december/)
+- 20th January - Horsham [(Red River Software)](https://studentrobotics.org/events/sr2024/horsham-tech-day-january/)
+- 2nd March - [Cambridge (Raspberry Pi Foundation)](https://studentrobotics.org/events/sr2024/cambridge-tech-day-march/)
+
+ **We need volunteers in order to run these Tech Days, [please sign up to volunteer](https://forms.gle/at6jwKjNXznREFz89)** if you're able to help out!
+
+## Virtual Competition Announced
+
+Following on from last years success we're running a Virtual Competition as a part of SR2024. Teams will submit their code and we'll run simulations pitting their virtual robots against the other teams before livestreaming the matches on our [YouTube channel](https://youtube.com/live/hlfaQIfLaRg) on the 9th March 2024.
+
+## Subscribe to SR(A)WN
+
+You can keep up with SR(A)WN online:
+
+- Join the `#srawn` channel on [Slack](https://app.slack.com/client/T0EEPF1LH/C01GBT8NMSN) _recommended_
+- Join the `srawn` mailing list on [Google Groups](https://groups.google.com/g/srawn)
+- Read historical issues on the [SR(A)WN Archive](https://studentrobotics.org/srawn)
+- Subscribe to the [SR(A)WN RSS Feed](https://studentrobotics.org/srawn/rss.xml)