Re: California District Competitions
 

I thought I had one too many in there...

With respect to the international teams, there are a couple of ways to handle that. One, which the current district areas take, is to tell them flat-out that they can't come. The other, which to my knowledge has not been tried, is that if a team counts their "home" regional in a given area, they have the option to be counted as part of that area for purposes of district competitions.

I have a third idea, but it's getting late so I won't go into full detail. Short version, take something like the current regional format, but cap the number of teams that can register from any given area with a district system. This allows for teams from the various areas with district systems to meet up at a venue other than Championship. This particular idea wouldn't be as desired now as it would be once the district system spreads across the country.

Re: California District Competitions
 

I really dont see Hawaii teams as a whole becoming a part of the California District competitions.
As long as you have to fly to get to events, its no different for us to fly to California vs. anywhere else on the Western side of the US. The only drawback I see is Hawaii teams being excluded from participating in such events as a result of not being part of it.

Its simply too costly for travel and the time to get robots in back to back events becomes a concern since we dont normally just drive the robot to events.

Michigan and MAR makes sense for all the reasons they made the move. For Hawaii, unless you plan on putting events all over Hawaii for teams to participate in during the course of the competition season, there would be no benefit.

Re: California District Competitions
 

With 36 teams currently in Hawaii, that is enough for 2 district events in the state now. There would soon have to be a 3rd district if the number of teams expands. I understand that travel between the islands is much more expensive than travel between districts on the mainland. But the teams would not have to travel interstate to compete in 2 district events.

California would need 10 district events to cover the current number of teams.

And the two states combined would feed into 2 championship events, to keep the scale the same as in FiM and MAR.

Re: California District Competitions
 

I don't see any current benefit of changing the Hawaii makeup. It's a solid destination regional, and the number of teams there make up for a nice state championship atmosphere. California already has more teams than Michigan, why add on 36 more teams?

On the subject of the district system finally (hopefully) spreading across the United States, it's a subject people love to pick apart at the conclusion of the State Championship (and now MAR, I guess).

The district system isn't this scary entity that threatened the sanctity of FIRST like most people (including myself) believed in its infancy. Like how South Carolina picks presidents, the Michigan State Championship picks Einstein competitors. What once was a pilot program has seem to become FIRST's idea of how to fix the degrading regional system we have in place.

Regionals made since in 2000. Michigan, California, and Texas had one competition each. If you wanted to go chill in Epcot and you had the money, you got to go and compete in the tents. If you were based out of Virginia and points North, you had options for multiple regionals.

Now it's 2012. We've gone from a collective of under 400 to a growing monolith of what, 2400? And championships haven't really grown much in the last few years because it simply cannot. It's a problem that needs to be solved, and the district model works. Now, the qualification structure doesn't always fit the region, nor does the seat count. However, I feel that you can scale it to any region of the country containing two or three close regionals.

I don't know if FIRST is going to sanction its spread, or more easily enable it, but it's coming. It's coming to New England, California, the Southeast, the Ohio Valley, greater metropolitan DC, the deep south, the upper and lower midwest, Texas...

I'm excited.

Re: California District Competitions
 

So maybe FIRST goes RPV? Small parts of teams travel to take care of the hardware, while the Controllers (drivers & strategists) stay home? Or the Controllers perhaps gather collectively in some relatively local multi-team environment, for the hoopla factor.
Wireless remote control (instead of autonomy) started down this path. The Kinect is extending it. Most fields become big arrays of OLED TV's. This is the real world, mostly autonomous machines with some remote (NM to Afghanistan) supervision.
FIRST 3132 hosts 2014 Championship? Talk about Thunder Down Under.