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[FRC Blog] Two Championship Survey Results and Path Forward
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...d-path-forward
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That's actually a surprisingly large amount of people filling out the survey (I've always wondered how many people fill out the surveys; I generally fill out most of the offseason ones and occasionally two or three of the weekly ones).
But srsly FIRST has made it clear since the town hall meeting that they have absolutely zero interest in listening to the community and doing anything other than two geographically split championship events, as opposed to two championship events divided in some other way* *as much as I love these proposals, I just have so much hesitance over them because of teams possibly having to 'shuffle' between championships (ie. finalist at a week 1 event, then winning a week 6) |
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What is the perceived value in the idea of one team, one vote?
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Engineers love data.
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The survey results were very surprisingly close to neutral, with the average response just under 5.
I was expecting a stronger bias. |
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Teams A2-61 then each have 10 or so members, but only 1 from each team votes. All 60 of those votes would have to be for option 10 (strongly support) in order to balance the overall score. My assumption is that they are comparing the overall responses to the 1 vote-per-team responses just like we (in the US) have the House of Representatives (reps proportional to the state's (team's) population) and the Senate (2 reps per state (team)). I see a potential value in the separating it out, but not much. |
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Another way of looking at these results is that 55% oppose two championships, 12% are neutral, and only 33% favor two championships. To me, that’s is a much more powerful statement about how the community really feels. |
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It is interesting that a lot of the analysis is team analysis; which is based off of an optional (identifying) field, e.g. team number. People in extreme camps are less likely to provide identifying information. This is likely going to skew all analysis done on data that excludes responses without the identifying information towards the perceived less dissenting answer, whatever that might be.
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I think that's reasonable: The vocal minority outweighs the silent majority in a lot of matters. This time, though, it's not exactly a minority--but it's close. I'd be thinking really carefully about my PR strategy if I was HQ--a good PR strategy can take a moderate opposition and take it to moderate advocacy given time, but a bad PR strategy can go the other way in a big hurry. I think my spin detector went off, too, at one point. What I take away from this is: 1, this is going forwards regardless of community feeling, and 2, the overall community isn't exactly happy, but isn't actively opposed. Y'all saw those committees, right? Boy do I pity those groups--I've got a feeling that more than anybody else (sorry, Frank and HQ), they're going to be the determiner of whether or not that survey result changes more towards strong approval. |
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"Keeping attendance costs reasonable" being only 4th (Edit: sorry 5th)...
I think a lot of really good teams are likely larger than average and if more of them do oppose than I can see more people from each bothering to respond to voice a negative opinion rather than somewhat positive or neutral. People tend to talk about things when they are very good or bad rather than in the middle. I you notice most or at least a lot of counter arguments supporting the move are merely pointing out that the switch seems more neutral than good or bad. People usually don't spend much time on something that they don't think will matter much. Also dislike of the need to switch vs dislike of the decision. That is dislike of getting surgery vs dislike of someone taking something from you will pull the results negative though everyone in negative isn't mad at HQ. |
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And... it would be interesting to know of the 33% who favor two championships what percentage only competes at ONE competition? |
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From a statistics point of view, there is no way to control for the 2 big reasons why the results are NOT statistically on-par.
1. It's a voluntary internet poll. The results will always be skewed toward the extreme. 2. There was survey bias in the number of possible responses. All in all, I feel that because of this, the results may be flawed, but there's one thing I can be certain of: the community responded negaitvely as a whole. |
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So, the big takeaway is that 50% of teams don't really care.
Well, at least that's not a surprise. |
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Looking at the "important elements" - #1,#3, and #4 are all impossible or highly diluted by implementing 2 championships. |
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But since you earned it: ![]() |
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Does anyone know if there's a standard method of "centering" a scale like this? (The true center is at 5.5, the average of 1 and 10). I don't have a statistical method of turning 4 buckets into 5, but I think the worst-case scenario would be that everyone who voted 1 would've voted 0, and everyone in 2 took 1 (no one votes 4). This creates a new weighted average of 3.92, which represents the low end of possibility: thus the average is somewhere between 3.92 and 4.47 when centered about 5. Did I handle that correctly? |
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Stepping away from the scale metrics for favorability-
The #1, #3 and #4 choices for what people want most out of Championship are all negatively effected by a split Championship. I have to say that particular aspect is very unfortunate. Quote:
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FIRST this is a total failure in my opinion.
I stated this to some of the FIRST HQ representatives while at champs this year who were telling me to go fill out the survey. What is the point of even having a survey, if contracts were signed for the venues before the survey or even this idea was announced? The survey would just capture how the community felt about the decision, not influence the decision at all. Furthermore, when going to two championships, I've heard speculation of possibly holding an official event where both championships alliances compete to have 1 world championship, to possibly rectify a majority of concerns. In my opinion, this doesn't rectify anything, and in fact unless FRC picks up the travel bill for the teams, it punishes the winning alliances because their season is now extended, and they will most likely need to re-travel to wherever this new event takes place. 2016, were going to be doing everything possible to earn our way to championships, its going to be the end of an era. P.S. I did fill out the survey even though I knew it had no real effect on the decision. And this data looks manipulated to the point of uselessness. |
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Having the "full progression of programs" at one event. (I can't remember the exact wording) Yet... Quote:
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I'd love to see the raw data and make my own biased set of statistics too. |
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This version of the data is much more illustrative to me than the bar graph.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-W...ew?usp=sharing edit: apparently I don't know how to put a picture on this. Be assured this isn't a rickroll. postedit: yes, I realize that's what a rickroller would type. |
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The other programs have always been relegated to sideshow status and I don't care if that continues. In fact, I'd like to see it stopped. If they can't be granted real "participant" status then I'd rather they not be there. Now, I'd like to have A championship that celebrates all the FIRST programs, the values of FIRST, and celebrates STEM. Just a thought on why that ranked so low (at least in my mind) |
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There's an old saying that goes something like "you can make statistics say anything...." That's what I feel like is happening here. The very long justification of favor/oppose is really just trying to find a way to beat the data into saying what you'd like it to say - and really they came very close.
Bear in mind, in surveys such as these, the people most likely to fill out the survey are people with an opinion on the issue, so it's not necessarily surprising that the largest number are in the "strongly oppose" camp, but I think that to have such a high number of respondents with the same viewpoint should be worth something. Should, but apparently, not so much - given that HQ remains committed to the two champs model. What frustrates me is their continuation of being committed to the geographic lock - their intent to form committees isn't one of "how to allow teams to attend either championship" but exactly what they planned to do before the town hall - nothing's changed. I don't see a particular value in getting people outside HQ to show up and tell them what regions should go to what championship- unless somehow we're allowed to lobby for it and everyone lobbies to go to one or the other. |
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So the actual average (taking into account that people who care about the outcome of champs) aka not team per team basis is 4.47
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Taylor, here's how you upload an image. :)
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The strongest takeaway I get from this chart is that over half the respondents (55%) are opposed, and less than a third (33%) are in favor. |
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FIRST's analysis of the survey numbers and this thread are great examples of the old theory of "people are just going to see what they want to see in the numbers."
When I looked at the numbers, I immediately grouped the data into buckets. Strongly oppose (ratings 1-3): 48% Neutral (ratings 4-7): 29% Strongly favour (ratings 8-10): 23% Of course, my parsing of the data is probably skewed by my own biases. Your mileage may vary. |
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This continues to get more ridiculous, I'm actually insulted by this blog.
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Sadly, the willpower is not there to make this happen. |
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I sincerely hope that FIRST has a solid plan for those community input channels.
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I worry about "social desirability bias" within and between teams.
And I hinted at it before but as I think about it how is "Keeping attendance costs reasonable" so low? It bothers me. To me it says that a higher proportion of teams don't need to worry about paying the same or more money for registration and travel. That is not indicative of a lot of teams. Going deeper: We do know more people care about (or people care more about):
Who would care most about these things but also not need to worry about costs? Lets look as attendance costs as registration fee first. Reasonable is most likely not less that $5,000 as clearly that's whats been needed. It also says "keep reasonable" implying the $5,000 we've had is reasonable. So if the majority of teams/people answering don't need registration to stay = or < $5,000... Lets even assume that the vast majority of teams actually have a sponsor who will upon the team qualifying pay the fee in full; money they would not have had otherwise. In that case travel costs are the only major money concern. Those costs go over $3,000 for hotels alone very easily. Who would care that much more about the above 4 than costs staying at least where they are? |
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My problem isn't completely with the 2 championship idea. I think with the right refinements, it will work just fine. I have a problem with how FIRST is dividing the event, because, at least in my not-so-humble opinion, they are moving the wrong way. Here's a quote from Don Bossi, copied from the transcript of the 2 Champs informational session: "At this event last year we announced that we found a way here within St. Louis to increase that and try to get that back into the 20 percent [of all FRC teams qualifying for champs] range by going to 600 teams... The story for FIRST® LEGO® League, FIRST® Tech Challenge, Junior FIRST® LEGO® League is much worse. FIRST Tech Challenge has the capacity for about 3 percent of their teams at Championship. FIRST LEGO League, it kills me when I talk to a FIRST LEGO League partner for a country and I say, oh we can’t even send a team this year, we don’t have a slot this year." He then discusses some thrown-out options for changing FRC. The fact that he doesn't go into detail about how changing the timing of FRC would improve qualification rates leads me to believe that the ideas he discusses wouldn't have fixed anything. As far as I'm concerned, his presentation of these ideas is little more than a way to strengthen his point through shocking the audience. Rhetoric aside, the most viable solution to the problems experienced by FLL and FTC are most easily resolved by the one solution that was discussed for the least amount of time. Why not put FTC at one event, and FRC at another? I recognize that FIRST wants to keep their programs intertwined, going along with the "progression of programs," but by giving FTC their own world championship venue, the size and scale of the FRC venue, they will be able to boost qualification rates astronomically. An FTC/FLL championship would also permit FTC to gain its own public identity. When asked about student robotics competitions, I have never come across a non-FIRSTer who knew anything about FTC. Most of them will answer a question about student robotics with something related to "I saw one that plays basketball!" or "oh, the little lego robots, right?" Perhaps it's time FIRST allowed FTC to gain their own identity, and make their championship event into their championship event. Perhaps it would be more logical to expand FLL into a double championship format, as head-to-head competition is a small, even nonexistent part of their program. By splitting FLL, you avoid the problems with not deciding a single winner of a highly competitive program, and you offer more space for more FLL teams to qualify. By putting FRC at one event and FTC at another, you keep the 2 most competitive events together, while significantly increasing the qualification rates for FTC. |
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Now, if FIRST had announced that the championships would now be held in Paris, I might complain a little louder and say, Hey, as much as I want to see my friends, and all the best teams, I simply can't afford that. Now I have to make harder decisions about whether I want to see all the best teams or whether I settle for something smaller and closer and cheaper. |
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Ranking things as singularly more important than others in cascading order is a very necessary tactic of survival in the very real very harsh world. People do it a lot when resources are tight. People around the world are always having to chose between things that should never be opposing each other. This survey asked what was more important and Ranking things as singularly more important than others is a good way to draw out true motivations and see what actually can be sacrificed for what if you absolutely must chose one. Sometimes you'll find that one thing is actually not as important than another after you are forced to think about it. A related example was when I got my second desktop I obviously thought I would need to transfer files from the old one. And there were a lot. After using the new computer for longer and longer I never did. It turned out none of that stuff was so irreplaceable or necessary. I never would have thought that while I had it and yet within a year I dissembled the hard drive to see how the insides worked. To think that everything on the hard drive was less important than my basic understanding of the engineering behind it. That is the sort of thing "ranking things as singularly more important than others in cascading order" can sometimes have and for good benefit. Don't discount the method. |
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I want to be excited about this. I really do. I AM excited to bring championships home to Detroit. I'm just...uncomfortable with how all of this is being handled. |
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Also can we stop assuming what teams that didn't vote want? The sample size of this survey was 7355 people and 52% of teams. That is huge, there is no reason to assume that this not an accurate view of teams/people as whole. Finally only 4.3 avg from students? That is disheartening, FIRST needs to remember this about the students and encouraging them, not about making everyone believe in the HQ's plan. |
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This also brings up an interesting point: Had this survey been given out before the announcements, I guarantee we'd see a different set of responses, and some different priorities (cost reduction would've been higher priority, and one true champion would've been less important). I hope the committee will come up with a solution for region locking so that I don't have to go on vacation to California and Washington to see some inspirational teams and my skunk buddies... |
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- Cost doesn't matter to me. - This split doesn't affect my costs as significantly as it affects other things I want to check off. - If the CMP doesn't give me 1, 2, and/or 3, cost doesn't matter because because I'm not going to fundraise (even some minimum reasonable cost) to go--e.g. I'll go to another regional, or save it for IRI, or build a better robot, or put it in the bank, or... - And probably at least several other reasons. No need to jump to conclusions about respondents. |
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My answer might have been different if FIRST had said, say "To give you what you want, in one giant world championship, we will need to move the event to some other country". |
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To throw a bit of FTC perspective into this thread: I understand that most FRC participants don't care about seeing FTC and FLL, and to be honest, I probably wouldn't either if I participated in FRC. However, it is the other direction which is much more significant (at least from my perspective). One of the biggest things that made the World Championship so special and different from other tournaments, like super-regionals, was the opportunity to see and interact with FRC teams and robots, and by splitting the programs, the FTC championships immediately feel less big and magical. This doesn't mean I support two championships, but it does mean that if there are to be two, some presence of the whole progression of programs seems valuable.
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My beef with the "Favor/Oppose 2 Championships" question is that it was asked without context (or, more charitably, that it was asked assuming that the respondents all knew that context). It's like asking people if they favor/oppose eating their vegetables.
Better questions might have been: "Do you favor/oppose two championships, if FIRST brought the two winning alliances together to crown one true champion?" or, "Do you favor/oppose two championships that are tiered, with all of the highest-ranked, most competitive robots attending one of the two events to determine the one true champion?" or, "The highest number of teams that could be accommodated by a single championship event is 650. The total number of FRC teams is increasing each year. Do you favor/oppose two championships, knowing that the number of teams attending a single championship each year will (on a percentage basis) continue to decrease?" |
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FRC members are not the only stakeholders here. |
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Was the reverse true for FTC? Did a lot of the students make the shuttle trip over to check out what was going on in FRC? And, this being my first year seeing it -- were FRC and FTC always this physically separated? |
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Also, I'd say the program/event sponsors are the highest paying stakeholder here (by a wide margin). |
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I honestly don't know. Would be curious to hear the numbers. |
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Now if you consider that big chunks of those registration fees are also being paid by some of the same sponsors giving directly to FIRST, then you would likely see something more along 19-25% team generated funding vs. 75-90% Corporate donations. I am not saying teams do not work hard for those donations, but I am trying to remind everyone that FRC is a very heavily subsidized game we all play being subsidized by sponsors who are betting on us to help change the culture of the World, and provide the workforce they need to change the world. PSA: Now that the season is over, Don't forget to thank your sponsors! It is one of the best ways to ensure they don't forget about you when they start handing out the money. |
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Unfortunately, this is like trying to use AYSO to promote interest in soccer. While AYSO participation has exploded, it has had little impact on the interest in soccer in the U.S. In fact such interest has only increased as the women's team became dominant at the World Cup and the men's team really became competitive in 1994. |
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55/88 = 62.5, neutral voters were removed from the total as well. So 62.5% of respondents who did not answer neutral were in the opposing range, which is exactly what his statement said.
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I don't think you can look at this data and reasonably say "most of FRC is opposed to two Championships," especially when the nonvoters likely don't care/are neutral. |
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I'd have to say that the highest paying (by a wide margin) stakeholders are the sponsors. |
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We can speculate all we want about the opinions of the people who didn't vote, but there's nothing to delineate the reasonableness of those speculations. Quote:
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However, I think if you polled all the sponsors they're probably not stoked that they get two chances to give their company air time...they're probably wondering how the hell they're going to make their steadily shrinking budgets for FIRST cover two events instead of one. |
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I very consciously voted a 5 in this.
As an American citizen who has consumed the Democracy Kool-Aid, I'd be sorely disappointed if my carefully considered vote was discarded. |
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And his result? I don't know how you can see a 48/29/23 split and suggest anything other than that "most" people are opposed. The whole thing just really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Some around here know I did not participate in FRC this year due to some issues last year ultimately resulting in my leaving the team I was with. The details surrounding that are unimportant. I've always been a pretty vocal person when I think things aren't how they ought to be, and many of the responses I've seen from FIRST management come off as being more about saving face and keeping up appearances than they are about correcting mistakes and being the best organization we can be. That's never sat right with me, and ultimately, I decided to sit back and take a year off, and see how I feel about returning to mentoring a team in 2016. Everything about the championsplit, and this survey, and Frank's blog about it is screaming to me that FIRST is an organization that has lost touch with its goals. I'd *love* to see the distribution of the students-only 4.3 average. The whole point of this is to inspire them. If they are similarly distributed to what we can glean from the overall numbers, only slightly more heavily biased to the low-end? That's terrifying and should be a serious wake-up call to HQ. This shouldn't be about spin-doctoring statistics to try and appease the masses with "See? We're not *really* doing something you all hate". If an announcement has decades-long mentors suggesting that they are willing to leave the program in favour of building their own within hours of said announcement? THERE'S SOMETHING REALLY WRONG. |
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However, unless you have a mathematical or industry standard to support the conclusion that 62.5% is more misleading than 4.45, I disagree. At the very least, Richard actually told us directly what his calculation was in the midst of a discussion that already took issue with the neutrality of the 5 average. Frank left his misleading calculation to be discovered, which is a huge problem in itself. I don't think that this was intentional by Frank. A very big part of this problem is that this is an intuitive scale on its face, but he should've done his homework before making a highly misleading and unqualified statement that included both the term 'average' and the term 'neither oppose nor favor'. The correct 'intuitive' truth that we're looking for--i.e. what the average looks like when centered about neutral--is somewhere between Richard's calculation and Frank's average. There's no way to access it. Do you have a better method of getting closer? This is an iterative issue; Karthik took one approach, I tried another averaging technique. |
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I'd be curious to know how many active users their are on CD. Many have been using the hive mind argument to show how the negative opinion of champs is only the most vocal people but I think this survey pretty much counteracts that. It doesn't really surprise me though after I had talked to many AZ FRC alumni who had pretty similar thoughts about champs. Wasn't sure about everywhere else though. I agree with others though about what was the point of the data if the results weren't surprising. I disagree that the point of the poll was about how to improve the 2 champs when a lot of the discussion just focused on what people thought about it. And why does what people think matter if it isn't going to change a single thing.
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As someone who has participated in the planning and execution of customer surveys and clinics before, I'm just going to leave this here for future reference.
Likert Scale |
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While we are on the subject of statistics, I discovered something very interesting that was cleverly hidden in the blog post by someone forced to communicate their true message to us secretly! :eek:
The survey result percentages were 26, 11, 11, 7, 12, 4, 6, 7, 4, and 12. If you combine those together to sum the full psychic power of all respondents, you get this sequence of numbers: 26, 37, 48, 55, 67, 71, 77, 84, 88, 100. If you remove spaces from the first sentences of the blog post (because that is how these things are done), and then extract the 26th, 37th, 48th, ... 100th letters from the post you get: N F E T H I P I N A. Once you have those letters it's immediately obvious that FIRST is trying to convey this to us: "THIN FE PAIN". And what could that be, other than an unmistakable reference to the pain of being cut by a thin iron/steel blade??? So, unless you are one of the lemmings bumbling through life as one of the New World Order's Illuminatis' brainwashed proles :rolleyes:, surely you understand that FIRST's real message to us (that they had to hide from their robotic overlords (whom I look forward to serving)) is this: Cutting the Championship in half to form two new Championships is painful for them and for us; but it is a compromise they believe will be both valuable and necessary, given their mission, and the constraints they face.;) Blake |
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....Half Life 3 confirmed? |
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1 vs 10 = 26 to 12 = 2.16:1 ratio 1-2 vs 9-10 = 37 to 16 = 2.31 ratio 1-3 vs 8-10 = 48 to 23 = 2.09 ratio 1-4 vs 7-10 = 55 to 29 = 1.90 ratio 1-5 vs 6-10 = 67 to 33 = 2.03 ratio No matter how you slice the deck, for every one person approving the championsplit, there are two people opposing it. |
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I have heard that key Championship Event sponsors were not made aware of this plan before we were, or consulted at all as to their thoughts on/ability to support two events. That seems like a huge problem. |
Re: [FRC Blog] Two Championship Survey Results and Path Forward
From a personal standpoint and as a mentor, I have one opinion on the championship split, and I've expressed that in other posts.
However, I also have some visibility into the sponsor side, so I'll speak to my knowledge there. I'm not an official spokesman of company policy, but since I got involved with FIRST, I've been more involved with the circles where decisions are made regarding educational donations and have lobbied for more support for FIRST. I see sponsorship dollars (at least at the Fortune 500 corporation level) as being a bit more flexible, with the ability to flex up to account for program growth. Over $500 billion is spent annually on pre-K to 12th grade education in the US by government. At my company alone, we averaged ~$30M/year (2009-2014) in education related donations. Of course, I advocate for FIRST to get a bigger piece of the pie, but there are a lot of great organizations out there all trying to solve the workforce development problem in unique ways. I quote these numbers simply to say that FIRST is still quite small relatively speaking, and the available funding for education is quite large. If FIRST could truly solve all the educational problems by just throwing more money at it, I suspect it would have happened already. For the FIRST model to work though, you need volunteer/mentor growth in conjunction with funding. If ~200,000 FIRST volunteers averaged 50 hours a year, and it would take $25/hr incentive pay to pull in new volunteers by just throwing money at it, you need ~$250M/yr to double the size of FIRST (assuming doubled need of volunteers). On top of that, the existing volunteers might be a little miffed the new ones are getting paid and they aren't. Sponsor money is important, but volunteerism is the key to growth IMHO. I think that if FIRST can continue to scale, continue to meet the objectives companies want in terms of increasing the quality and quantity of qualified students entering the workforce, increase its reach/availability to historically underrepresented groups in engineering, etc... funding for the program will continue to grow. We're also very much interested in growing our volunteer base, as employees that are passionate about mentoring, their communities, etc., often bring that passion to work, as well as provide positive representation of the company. We don't really spend a lot of time talking in terms of "marketing/advertising" opportunities at championship(s). The discussion is typically more of "how can we be most efficient with our donated dollars". Do we fund program A or program B? Who has shown they can do more with less and spend our grant money wisely. There is also the consideration of supporting our employees. If they choose to volunteer with an organization, it increases our confidence in said organization, so we want to back their efforts with additional funds. As this all relates to championships and the championship split (sorry for rambling)... if it results in an increased student experience and supports growth, it will probably be seen as a positive change. The logistics of being present at two events are workable, and the overall cost to send representation is not prohibitive with respect to typical donation levels. That being said, it is pretty tough to measure "inspiration", and to understand if adding an additional championship is both the best way to support raw growth, as well as a cost effective way to increase inspiration. Perhaps the right answer is to continue to leverage volunteers to increase the quality of "lesser" events, to push the district models harder, etc. I won't claim to know the right answer, but I will say that whatever makes FIRST grow and scale better, will probably be seen as favorable from a corporate sponsor standpoint. |
Re: [FRC Blog] Two Championship Survey Results and Path Forward
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Now if they had picked individuals in FRC at random, with a very high response rate, I might be more inclined to give weight to the results. Otherwise the survey is suffering from a tremendous response bias (how many people that don't have a strong opinion on a subject are going to volunteer their time to do a survey?) |
Re: [FRC Blog] Two Championship Survey Results and Path Forward
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The response rate to the survey was only 10%. I'm one of those neutrals in the remaining 90% that didn't respond. |
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