[North Sailor]

I find this discussion to be remarkably stimulating. I read through earlier today, and dismissed it, but then couldnt help but to think about the topic several hours later. So this is what I came up with...

The Chairman's essay could probably best be compared to an essay submission for a scholarship or application for a university or grant, in that it's purpose is to outline through effective communication skills in an innovative way that stands out from the crowd those factors which make a team a good role model to others.

Within FIRST Gracious Professionalism and Coopertition exist as the two core FIRST values, which guide many teams actions including basic respect, sportsmanship, and even strategic alliances between teams. Many have extrapolated this concept to the basic mantra that FIRST is an open source competition with complete transparency between teams, with many examples of this on display here on Chief Delphi.

As a mentor who leads my teams strategy towards the Chairman's Award each year, I would suggest that teams should not be required to share their award winning essays. I would even go as far as to suggest that those that do share them reconsider.

On the other hand I do encourage all teams whether they have won an RCA or not to share their outreach efforts through videos and articles on their team websites and social media pages.

I believe through this publicity teams will be able to continue to inspire each other to develop new innovative means by which to share the FIRST message, and serve to benefit themselves within their own community as a means of publicizing their efforts and raising awareness for sponsors.

If teams wish to share theme ideas for their presentation, or the videos, or their slides, pamplets, etc, that is fine. However, the actual essay, a piece of raw text, represents the writing effort of a single or group of students on each team, which serves as a valuable resource in itself, and an educational opportunity for that student or group to work with a mentor to develop their own writing style.

So Conclusion: Share Essay (NO) Share Activities (YES) But on either account making it mandatory would be sort of strange. The closest thing I can see is having the video have to be publicly available through a youtube playlist or something.