We need some advice for best way to implement AS for kids teams. Maybe it's not a great fit, but we'd like to be able to use AS to register teams of kids for our service learning program:
http://www.slant45.org/

We are extending this program that we ran in association with the most recent Super Bowl in North Texas. The idea is that groups of kids perform service community projects and their adult mentor/leader/coach gives updates on our site and communicates with other leaders.

Because many of the kids are in elementary school, we don't want to target them as users. Normally we'd say, hmm pretty easy - just have the team leaders create one account per team. Then logged in as a team, they can post progress and photos and join as many affinity groups (environment, wellness, peace, education, advocacy, etc.) as they like.

While this would work fine for most teams, some of the adult members will be administrators who will report progress for all the teams on an entire campus or perhaps across an entire small school district or non-profit partner. In this case, requiring multiple user accounts with credential management issues and such is thought to be excessively burdensome. So then we are looking at a new team entity where a user account can own and control many of them. But then my guess is there is no easy way to then make a team into a fully fledged AS participant. That's kind of fighting against the one-to-one user-to-profile relationship found in DNN/AS/AF. Is that right? Seems like we'd be getting into major customization going this route.

Now if we were considering making the teams into groups so that more than one user could be part of a team (say for older teen teams where we might allow student accounts), then Team type groups and affinity groups (based on project themes) could become confusing for the users? I'm not sure. We're new to AS, so could really use some help thinking this through. I haven't even figured out if groups can join groups.

Best,

Karim

So we're going ahead with this option which kind-of makes single-member groups commonplace. More importantly, it emphasizes groups over individual members - in that the group directory and group detail will likely be the primary pages and getting a lot of detail on groups is more important.

So my question now becomes - what is the best way to enhance groups? We basically need the ability to add a form (or two) so that each group can provide additional info about themselves (# participants, project description, start and end dates, affiliation drop-downs for school districts, schools and clubs, etc). We're trying out group properties, but with only text data-types, they are no where near as flexible as member profile properties. There's some "coming soon" language in the docs about adding other data-types, but my guess is that got sidelined by the acquisition. Group categories help a little bit, but they too are a bit limited. They also have very limited length and no tooltip capability so it is hard to give examples or explanation of what the categories mean.

So is there a forms module out there that could be adapted or plugged into the group entity? Still beginning research on third-party integration. Or is this something that requires full customization?

There is an initial group custom field feature built in (group properties).  Currently it's limited to text fields.  I think the plan on the roadmap was to expand this into other data control types (drop downs, etc).  Ideally I'd like to see this expanded even to the point of looking up data through SQL queries in the controls to make connecting groups to other module data easier.