MassFIRST
 

In response to this thread:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=22749

who in Massachusetts would be interested in starting a support program for the teams here in this state? (Yes... I am ripping of the Indiana-FIRST people, but that just means you have a good idea) I mean, geeze... we're the oldest state in the country and we still don't have a Regional! :p

Lets discuss...

We need a regional here in Boston. Either NU or BU or MIT (my preference for historical reasons).

As for creating a MassFIRST organization - I'm game. I know how to make those web dealies, so lemme know if that helps.

We could also get advice from the Indiana FIRSTers to find out how to make things run smoother as we get started...cough cough :)

And let's get Woodie involved too!

I think its a great idea and I'd be happy to help out.

one of the mentors was talking of utc to have one in west springfield big e fair grounds but they want to stay in conn.

Yes, I know about that one (connections with UTC). The Big E grounds has better venues... but UTC is Hartford based; so of course, they wanted to stay in CT.

Of course, me personally... would love to see a Regional in Boston. I camped out at the Hynes convention center all day today, but it's not appropriate for holding a regional in. But the important thing is... i'm looking around.

But MassFIRST wouldn't really be about putting together events, it would be more about support, workshops, team building, networking... stuff like that. I'm just getting an idea for interest.

I think we should have it in WUSTA!!! Thats Worcester to you outsiders.

We need another Regional in New England. Boston would be a good location especially since several of the regioanl events in the New England Area and Middle Atlantic States (especially those closer to N.E.) filled up fast. I was at Hynes too with Erin, its not suited for it. Also there are alot of hotels obviously in this area and you could take the T around town. We should all get together and form this!

I have said this many times before, but someone needs to start a team in Salem MA!

They have a HS and also Salem Community College for support!!

Plus I really want to see a robotics demonstration on Salem Commons when I go there in October every year!!

:D

If you are looking at starting a regional, maybe forming a regional committee is more appropriate than forming a support group for teams. There is nothing that says you can't do both group, but each one of them takes a huge amount of resource and people to pull them off. A regional committee, for example, have enough work for a whole year. A team support group like IRI, WRRF, and SCRRF, also takes a lot of work, pretty much year round minus the 6 weeks.

You should focus in one thing first before taking different front at once.

It would be about helping area teams.

157#1driver The worcester centrum centre(i spelt it right) would be a great place for a regional. there is crazy amounts of room for pits and competition grounds as well as cheap places to park. Also 190 is leterally less than 3 miles away from it. The city of worcetser as i know first hand as a resident is very interested in giving back to the community. Also they want to keep up their image as an all american city having a first regional their would be very easy. Hell if all comes to the wors we could do it at wpi right in teh room battle cry is held in. Also I have some connections to city hall in worcester so support from the city wouldnt be that hard to get. As far as the creating of a massachusetts first organization. Im all for it eventhough im in new york. I have lived in massachusetts and would be more than willing to promote my time to it.

I would go for creating Mass FIRST and then work on the regional and a workshop like the one in Indiana. This way we can increase the communication between teams and get together a large enough group that when we want to do something complicated (like invitationals, workshops, and regionals) we can just look for a show of hands and form a committee.

Here in Southern California we have SCRRF AND a regional committee. SCRRF is focused on supporting teams through workshops, fundraising, mentor referals, off-season competitions and whatever else we can think of. We have also turned in all the paperwork for 501(c)3, though I don't recall hearing that it is official yet. (It takes months to be processed)

The Regional committee has one goal, support the regional. The regional committee provides most of the bodies to put on the event. It also has its own fundraising subcommittee to cover local expenses. (If you think raising $10-30K for a team is hard, try raising $170K for a regional.)

But if you look closely at the membership of the two groups, there is a lot of overlap at the top. Most of the SCRRF board is also on the Regional committee. The two organizations HAVE to work together, so it really helps co-ordination when they are the same people. But by having them separate organizations, it helps maintain the focus.

One of these days, when the FIRST competition moves to the Dave Lavery model, or when the Regional funding is better established, we might merge the organizations. Or rather, SCRRF will become the de-facto organizing committee. But that will be a couple of years yet.

BTW all you Southern California teams ARE sending a representative to the SCRFF meeting on Saturday, RIGHT?

Well i must admit this for going off topic lsightly earlier.... but yeah, form a support base for area teams. Then from there you could have a subornitate group to put together a regional. However, let's working on supporting one another first and then and only then worrry about a regional event here. I think we'd all agree that more teams, perhaps even more teams, from Mass. would be better than a regional (ok don't yell at me) that come back every year and compete.

Now what I want to do is drive our bot through Qunicy Market holding a garbage pail (we proved we could do this at Freshman Open House) with a sign on it that says donate too FIRST Robotics....... :D but that's another story.

Just thinking about the amount of work involved and how late in the year it is, maybe it would be better to start something like a New England FIRST Team Leaders Association. Team Leaders could meet monthly or something and offer advice/help with fundraising, selling FIRST to companies/schools, etc. Maybe that would be an easier place to start than a 501(c)3 and once we had all the people in a room we could have a good discussion about a Boston regional (or anything else) and branch off into a committee to form it.

Wouldn't the team leaders be the first people to found MassFIRST anyway? Or ar least they'd be the most likely representatives to it. From then you elect an overall board of people (which these team leaders may be on or at least someone they know they can trust to be on it).

I would gladly do that if I go to college in Boston. I was thinking of seeing if I could hold workshops in the Boston Musuem since they all ready do that with robotics. Boston is such a interesting place and it sure beats New York in terms of people and activities(except for baseball).

This sounds like a great idea. How do we start?

I think a good start is to gather at many people as possible who are interested in making it happen and then start discussing all these ideas. So...tell all your friends! :)

I think you guys should start out small. Maybe not even have it have 501(c)3 status first. I'm not sure how well 'bonded' the teams are in the state, but that will make a huge difference on how well your organizaition will run. In reality, IndianaFIRST has been in existance since the 2000 season, i believe. Starting out small with a few workshops once a year will be great. Then every year gradually build up to where you need to be. I think Indiana is at the point in time where we need to get an established organization going to further build awareness and support. Andy Baker's house is getting a little too small for us to have meetings. :D


Let us know if you need any advice or help with anything, we all would be glad to help. :]

Cool... thanks for the info. Obviously, I don't think we have any intention of making this a big organization any time soon, but it would be nice to get a small group of people together to initiate things like workshops and such.

Mass teams aren't well bonded at all (as I see it), and it would be nice to change that.

If you want to get workshops going, Cindy Abrams at FIRST will help you out with what you need. (603) 666-3906 x403 <-- so you might wanna call her if you are curious about how you can go about it cause she'll help get you information and such. I hope that helps.

I might be able to get my college to host a meeting. We're in Berkshire County which is a shlep for the Boston teams but it might help to promote FIRST in Western Mass, where teams are especially scarce.

Here is what we have done in Indiana:

1. Conduct an "Indiana FIRST Team Leaders" meeting in the fall. This meeting get us ready for the workshops and ensures that the new teams have mentors in their area. This takes place usually in Sept. or Oct.

2. Conduct a "workshop" day so that all of the teams in the state can bring all of their members to come and learn about FIRST. We have meetings about everything from RCU to C Programming.

3. Host a remote kickoff. This is another chance for teams to get together and interact. Teams get their kits shipped directly to Kokomo for easy pickup, while their team leaders can still go to NH for the big kickoff.

4. Host an off-season competition. Borrow a playing field from FIRST and get the right people to run the event. Start out small, find a good facility, and build it from there.

5. Create a website to bring state teams together. David Kelly set ours up at www.indianafirst.org. Not only can we communicate between teams this way, but if we run across a possible state-wide sponsor or organization, then we can refer them to this website and we appear farily organized.

6. Have open lines of communication between teams. We often email each other or call each other.

... and have patience for each other as each team goes through its own issues.

Good luck!

Andy B.

Thanks Andy!

I think it would be a good idea for Mass area teams to post again here and discuss which of the ideas they'd like to duplicate and which are most important to start with.

The first thing to do is to have the team leader meeting. It is very important that you have a face to face meeting with the dedicated FIRST-a-holics around your area. It makes everything more real, and you can get through a lot of discussion in a meeting. You can figure out how much everyone is willing to do.

And be realistic. All of you have a robotics team, and competition is starting in January. So chances are, you will be really busy during 6 weeks and build period. So focus your discussion for offseason/preseason first.

Having a remote kickoff is fairly easy to do, if you just want to watch the broadcast together. What we do here is we arrange it with NASA Ames and get a feed coming to San Jose State University (not just the internet broadcast), and we setup a room so that about 4 team representative per team can gather together and watch the game on a big projection screen. Then if you want to have scoring objects at the remote kickoff, you will have to arrange it with the regional director around your area to set something up.

As far as workshops goes, you can talk about what kind of workshop you want to have, but most important of all you have to find the teachers for team. The team leaders, teachers, engineers are great resources for the workshops. Have a panel of discussion about how to run a team, or get a programming workshop going, or a drive train workshop. The limiting factor will be how many teachers you will find. When the first workshop happens, chances are the teachers teaching the workshops will get their team to come attend the workshop, so you should get a pretty good turn out. You just have to find a venue, like a local university, with enough class rooms and parking. Just figure out what equipment the teachers will need, such as projectors, and you got yourself a workshop.

Also, as I remember correctly Erin is having an off season competition next year. This will be a great way to see how strong of a group you will have. Have all the teams interested in MassFIRST volunteer at that competition. It will make the competition much more friendlier.


Finally, the most important of all, take advantage of this chance to get all the contact information in one place. Set up an e-mail list so that you can send e-mail to the community. Don't spam the list too much, or else people won't want to stay on the list.

Good Luck!

Charge Something
 

One tip. Charge something for everything from the beginning. Sad to say but you need an operating budget and that needs to come from somewhere.

Here in Southern California one team, 22, started having workshops, off season and preseason competitions as a service to the area teams. They did this at no charge, absorbing the costs in their team budget. There weren't that many people involved and it was more trouble to do the book keeping than it was worth. As the number of FIRST teams grew, they could no longer continue to do so. What single team here could realisically expect to host workshops for 31 teams, and over 300 people and still have a competition budget? But that is how many showed up for our workshops a couple of weeks ago.

So they got some teams together and started SCRRF. SCRRF needs to charge for our events. We can't even get a facility with out paying some sort of rent, let alone all the other "little" expenses. For the Fall Classic we looked into having a FIRST field, but we were talking several thousand dollars just in shipping costs to get it here. So we used one team's practice field ( a retired FIRST field) instead. But even then we had to rent a truck to get it to the competition site and rent the site itself.

Now we have teams complaining about having to pay for things that have always been free. They were NEVER free, it is just that in the past somebody else carried the cost for them, out of the goodness of their hearts.

So charge something from the beginning and save yourself a lot of whining in the future.

Re: Charge Something
 

I partially disagree with that statement. Here in GA we hold our workshops for about 16 teams now for 10 weeks. We started off absorbing the cost into the team budget and came to the point this year where that was not going to cut it.

I'm glad to say that they workshops are still free and a whole lot better thanks to the additional sponsors that we obtained specifically to fund the workshops.

I'm not saying that there is something wrong with charging, just that if you can get a company or two to foot the bill its worth it.

i think charging is the exact opposite thing that should be done. There should not be a burden on teams with other costs and fees. Fund-raising is already hard enough getting the money they can. People are not going to want to get into an organization that they have to pay to participate. Thats why i think that MassFIRST or in our case IndianaFIRST should be totally separate and not supported by any individual team. It should share no costs or have to be supported, financially, by those teams.

I completely agree. I just wanted to say that in my previous post when I mentioned absorbing the cost into the team budget I was speaking not of the high school team, but of the organization we have going through Tech (GT FIRST) very similar to IndianaFIRST and the proposed MassFIRST.

That's what I'd like to see happen with MassFIRST. I'm still somewhat torn on the idea of charging money. This is why I hate money.

The teams got to understand that nothing in the world comes free. It is very nice that there are all these people caring about FIRST very much and want to give free workshops or competitions to the teams, but if the teams can't even afford a little money for an off season competition, or taking workshops, then they are going to have a really hard time.

The bottom line is, it takes money to provide quality service. The point is that you don't rip teams off charging them. Couple a hundred dollars for entering an offseason competition is more than fair compare to the few thousand dollars FIRST charge for regionals. $5 per person take take an all day workshop learning a great deal about engineering and other business related area is more than fair for the students.

By charging an resonable amount of money, the organizating running the events have a source of income, and can continue to provide to service in the coming years. Getting sponsors to support the short term events are nice, but in the long run it is much more healthier to use those sponsor money in investment in the organization, such as getting equipments you can use for a long time, or building up the organization itself.

The organizations will do a lot more good if they live to continue the service they provide to teams instead of doing it for a couple of years and stop because of lack of resources.

I think that you could "highly encourage" teams to buy lunch or something at events, that'll pay off the expenses necessary, yet at the same time leaves the workshops or whatever it happens to be open to anybody who wants to to show, and I'm sure if you tell people that it does cost them to run the thing, they won't mind paying an extra dollar or two at a lunch you host if it's paying for the things, so your not forcing people to pay money, so it's open for all to come to.

Thanks for all this helpful discussion, all the advice is much appreciated. However, I'm a fan of taking things one step at a time. So before I start figuring out ways to pay for events that aren't planned yet, we should come out with a mission statement first... a purpose:

From what I observe, MassFIRST's needs wouldn't need to be as extravagant as IndianaFIRSTs or SCRRF. If I said we didn't have location on our side, I'd be lying. From all points in Mass, FIRST Headquarters is no more than a 3-4 hour drive away, and we have two Regionals that are easily accessible (BAE and UTC). We have plenty of companies and corporations around that I'm sure hasn't been tapped for funding, and a large population to support a large number of teams.

With all this on our side, then why are we loosing teams?

That's where I think MassFIRST should step in. To try to figure out:

1. why teams are fading away
2. what can we do to keep them
3. have a dedicated group to go out and solicit funds and interest from local companies, and then match them with a team
4. offer help to rookies
5. organize forums and workshops where many teams can mutually benefit and learn
6. put together somewhat social events where we can all meet up and 'network' better
7. inject new enthusiasm into older teams
8. ... anything that would add to the fun
9. website to keep line of communication open (we'd definately need a dedicated webmaster, who would want to do it?)

When it comes to a Regional, it's up to FIRST to put a Regional in Boston. We could help plan it... but for now, it's their call. They've seriously considered it before, its just a matter for need to come up. For an off-season, yes... I am planning a Beantown Blitz for next year. For initial organization, NU would want to keep it as "their thing," but I would be hoping that many different people would want to volunteer for it. It could also be part MassFIRST convention, and a place where people who are thinking of starting a team may go and learn more about FIRST (I just learned that my Mom want's to start a team in Bloomfield, CT... oh boy).

For starting out, I think these are good main objectives. Inevitably we'd expand in years to come... but it's good to start small and learn as you go.

Comments?

Website: Like I said before, I know how to do that web stuff. I'd be more than happy to dedicate to it. I have space on BU's server that we can use as a temporary site and/or work space, so getting something in the way of a website wouldn't be too hard. Currently I think the only part of the site that I won't be able to make happen is the forums. I could probably copy a PHP forum from somewhere, however I don't know PHP yet, so I won't be able to do much with it. Anyone in Mass know PHP? I suppose there are other ways to do it, but everyone is so familiar with these good ol' PHP forums - it just seems like that'd be the way to go.

This sounds like a great idea to me. I actually have a book -how to form a nonprofit corporation by the nolo press- which is pretty much the bible when it comes to 501(c) and a little knowledge of the paperwork involved. if anyone from Boston wants to borrow it, just give me an email.

Generalbrando: PHP's pretty simple if you have any programming experience at all, go here for the quick and dirty way to start http://www.php.net/tut.php.

For a site like this, I'd definitely recommend using some preexisting community management tools, like drupal or zope. All the good stuff like calendars, forums, news management etc. comes prewritten, debugged, and there's a community of thousands of users to help you customize it.

Thanks guys for all of your input. Once as we get together we can assimliate them all... I tihnk Erin already has. A website would definately good (good job you guy sat Indinan FIRST... its beautiful). And remeber K.I.S.S..... something we always seem to forget... most of us anyway :D