Form 501c3, quit job, raise $500,000 for the first year and ~$300,000 for each following year... Seems doable... Pretty sure my wife would veto one of those steps.

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

You're forgetting:

Train 5x more (probably under-estimating this number) the amount of volunteers there currently are.

IndianaFIRST has approximately 250-300 unique volunteers (including judges) for four events. And we have not quite achieved our 2018 goal of Key Volunteers only having to work two events per official competition season.

As I said in an earlier post... We are well aware of the volunteer need. That is the main stumbling block at the moment. I've talked to many mentors and teams who are willing to step up and volunteer, myself included.

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

It's worth noting that you can in fact have different people working on and worrying about different things. It's not unreasonable to bring in new people to work on new issues that need to be resolved in a future transition to districts.

I'm really happy that Jess and Rahul talked to so many teams at the event, because the first step in transitioning to districts is convincing people that it needs to happen. If it's just some vocal minority yapping on Chief Delphi, of course nothing is going to happen.

Once we have enough teams and people who believe that districts is the correct path forward, I think it will be much easier to find all the resources and people necessary to make the transition. Part of getting to that point is education, part of that point is developing and communicating a plan. I commend Jess and Rahul on getting started on the education part, but without the cooperation of the RPC it will be very, very difficult to make meaningful progress on the plan part.

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

Do the $5000 registration fees that teams pay go towards that figure? Or would the non-profit running the district have to shoulder that cost by themselves?

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

The initial $5,000 registration fee still goes to FIRST, not the district (but some portion of that does come back to the district, not sure on the exact amount). However, third (and more) play fees as well as DCMP fees (I'm pretty sure) do go to the district.

From the District Planning Guide, page 10:

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

Just the third play and any interdistrict plays fees in that District go to the not-for-profit that runs the district. Depending on how many third plays you have it could be a substantial amount of money, maybe enough to cover the cost of a district event.

Rahul, I think you've done a good thing and handled the situation well and hopefully we'll all be able to look back in a couple of year at this as the start of a change in Minnesota.

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

Currently the breakdown is:

$5,000 initial team registration (that allows for two district plays) goes to HQ, with $1,000 per team coming back to the district area.

All of the $4,000 registration for the District Championship event goes to HQ and not the district area.

$1,000 registration for third district play (that happen within that district area) goes to the district area, even if the team playing an extra event is from a different district area. (So when a team from Michigan plays in Indiana, IndianaFIRST receives the $1,000).

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

Yeah, you're right, I edited my post. Thanks!

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

Another question to answer: What will be done with the teams that can't afford (or aren't allowed) to travel for an event? Multiple teams in the Twin Cities area fit this description, and wouldn't be able to do a second event.

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

That already happens in other areas and can be largely unavoidable unless you utilize advantages of the district system like run two local Saturday/Sunday events.

Questions like this have already been answered in other regions to varying degrees of success and it is up to the environment the would-be leadership operates in and the action they want to take to address varying types and levels of adversity in the system.

Not all district systems are created equal but they all deal with similar challenges. The road has been paved but it is not the road's responsibility to buy the car or pump the gas.

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

With the number of events required, having 2+ in commuting distance for TC teams should be trivial.

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

I'm surprised about how the RPC didn't promote the mentor roundtable, yet expected mentors to show up. I was there all 3 days and didn't hear anything about this. If you hold a mentor roundtable, you need to promote it like crazy and get a majority of the mentors there. Maybe something at the state championship would be a better place to have the discussion, which it sounds like it may be happening.

I was also wondering why they got all taken down as well, as I glanced at it on Thursday but wanted to take a look at the cost on Friday. I was a bit discouraged looking at your flier about how you said that "These spots would be guaranteed to go to MN teams instead of Iowa or Wisconsin teams." I hope you know that 4 of the 11 Iowa FRC teams (almost half) attended the Minneapolis regionals this past weekend. That being said, I think it is a good thing to have districts to make it less expensive for everyone participating and potentially grow the program. They could be located closer to teams encouraging them to promote it within their local communities to bring their fans out. The architecture of districts is best for states with high saturations of teams and making it much lower key than regional events.

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

I can't imagine, out of the 10-12 events required in MN, that there wouldn't be more than two events within an hour's drive of the Cities. If I remember correctly it's about half of all MN FRC teams that are based in the Twin Cities or surrounding suburbs. There are a LOT of high schools, community colleges, and universities in the Twin Cities area which could be approached. Some of those high schools already host off season events or Week Zero events.

Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
 

As its been pointed out it shouldn't be a problem with where most teams in MN are located. Typically districts pop up within 15 minutes of previous events with more in between. We used to have three regionals within an hour of us and now we have five districts in that same vicinity. :)


Districts and travel are more an issue for rural teams. In New England it causes problems for teams from Northern New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine who might have one event they can drive to (less than an hour commute) and then have to travel to their second event. If they move on to the District Championship they typically have to travel however most of the region has to as well depending on how large your district is.