Resources

There is no “management” as such, rather, team members should take initiative to work on what they think is valuable and or important to making our robot.
Cabals (sometimes) do have “team leads,” but they aren’t a managerial role, instead of acting as a resource bank, keeping the doings of the cabal in their head, so if anyone has questions about what is happening, they can act as an “oracle” of information.
To initiate some sort of project/idea, just start working on it. Talk to other members and try to recruit people to your project/goal, both for help and because gaining insight and other personal opinions/ideas will influence your own opinions, and make your idea or project better. You should then work on and build upon that idea with others to make it a reality, or a working prototype. After this process, inform the rest of the team about what you (and others) have done, to get more feedback and insight for an even better end result.

It’s natural in a flat structure like this to feel like you’re failing because for all the stuff you decide to work on, there are dozens that aren’t getting your attention. This is completely normal, and it isn’t expected of you to devote time to every opportunity that you are presented with or asked about. It’s your decision to prioritize and choose the most important work to do; You will learn how to do this better with experience.

The whole robotics team does have officially scheduled meetings, but cabals themselves don’t. It is easier and more effective for cabals to have more organic in-person and online discussions (over text or voice chat) to discuss things rather than having these scheduled meetings, and to avoid conflicts with other meetings, but it’s up to the cabal in the end.
One thing we will use is Discord threads, where you can create a temporary channel to discuss stuff, so each cabal may have their own thread that they use for their internal discussions.

We do have a list of currently active cabals and who is part of them, but the best way to familiarize yourself with what’s happening is to ask around. You can ask anyone really, and if you’re looking for someone who is involved with certain projects you can check the list.
If you see a cabal you are interested in working on, just write your name down and start participating in that group:
By letting them know
Asking to figure out what they’re currently working on
Showing up to any meetings they have (you don’t necessarily need to have meetings, see next bullet)
Participating in organic discussions IRL or on Discord.

As is common with most good engineering projects, you must prototype quickly and iterate. We cannot stress how important it is just to make something working first that covers the core requirements, as opposed to trying to make something that is the best from the beginning, as the latter is not possible with complicated projects with thousands of variables like this one.
Then, from the point you have the core prototype, iterate, iterate very frequently, and get lots of feedback. That is the best way to engineer and just design in general. This also applies to non-engineering things as well, the whole prototypes and iteration idea.
In short, the secret to quality work is to Move Fast and Break Things. Elaborating more on the break things part, don’t dig yourself into some structure from the beginning, make sure your ideas can change rapidly throughout the competition season, as well as not fall into the sunk cost fallacy.