Chief Delphi - Seating Lottery?

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Re: Seating Lottery?

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1306scouting (Post 1279525)

Having a dedicated scouting area would be nice, but every team has different needs. Many teams (including my own up until this year) would need at least 6 seats to accomodate their scouting team. 7 would be even better. At 7 seats per team, and let's say 50 teams in a regional, that's 350 seats. Many venues couldn't accomodate that many seats without making compromises in seating for other groups (VIPs, cheering sections, and the like).
None of these account for teams that use computer based systems (and the associated power requirements) or that would need to move their scouting sheets from the dedicated area to a processing area.

If the teams of a regional wanted to organize it, I could see it happening. I would never ask a regional planning committee or a Regional Director to try to organize this for the teams, as the logistics are very difficult. Keep in mind this is for a scouting section alone, just the requirements I know from teams at my regional, and ignoring any setups I saw at Championships or here on CD.

The blue seats right next to the field at the Wisconsin regional were actually a designated scouting area. Each team was allowed 6 scouts there, I don't think it was very well advertised yet though.
I was on crutches during the event, and was kicked out of those seats during opening ceremonies by a volunteer. I understand why that occurred, I wasn't a scout, but that just goes to show how difficult dividing areas of seats can be.

Re: Seating Lottery?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cory (Post 1279465)

This is far too much work for FIRST to implement, on top of all the things they already need to deal with.

Cory, You misread my post...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kims Robot (Post 1279453)

If an event was able to provide:
...
What would you think?

I was asking about one particular event, not having FIRST do this for every single event. Once an event has been run at a venue for a couple of years and has a stable committee, doing "extras" like this are very very doable (already several venues have implemented scouting sections, cheering sections, and seating indications).

With the right team and support, a Regional Planning Committee is completely capable of doing something like this with the right venue. I agree that FIRST implementing this on a grand scale would be very difficult, but the Regional Planning Committees are given quite a bit of leeway in running their events, and I was interested to see if anyone would be interested in a model like what I proposed - I was not asking if it was possible.

Quote:

Originally Posted by s_forbes (Post 1279535)

Maybe sporting an unpopular opinion here:
Is there actually anything wrong with the current free-for-all system?

I'm actually glad you spoke up... not many people do that "like" the system. I am personally not a fan of the current system, but I'm interested to know that there are people that are.

I have yet to see people debate the 40 seats or talk much about the 5/6/7 ideas... any more thoughts?

Re: Seating Lottery?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kims Robot (Post 1279565)

I have yet to see people debate the 40 seats or talk much about the 5/6/7 ideas... any more thoughts?

40 seats, for the team I was on in H.S., would be either about right, or too much by about 10. For most of the teams around us, it would be about half the size they needed. I'd say that if you did something like that, you would HAVE to have a trading board, where teams could post seats in blocks of 10 or so. You'd probably want to do this via white board... but it'll be complicated to get the word out unless there was only one entrance to the stands. (Basically, if you do #5, you will need to do #6.)

And then, as I pointed out earlier, the lottery will raise all sorts of issues. I'll just start with the team who randomly gets the absolute worst seats in the house, and go from there to the team who gets seats right behind a team who happens to stand for the entirety of every match they're in and thus nobody behind them can see. Insert complaining here, especially if a team attends multiple events and this randomly happened at both. Adding in #7, the special requests, may help with #6 a bit (80 seats between 2 teams should be doable), but creates even more of a headache for whoever runs the lottery.

Sometimes, a technical solution is harder than a culture-changing solution. I like the current system, and it seems like the only issues with it are cultural/social, not technical.