Quote:
Originally Posted by Cynette
Story aside, as an auditor and implementer of international standards, I always have a problem when "guides" become "rules." Guides are suggestions, recommendations, best practices, encouragements, good ideas. Rules are rules, requirements, shalls, must dos (or must not dos) as the case may be.
This is the purpose of the FIRST Safety Manual:
This safety manual is an easy-to-use guide for important safety information and provides FRC participants with a basic set of requirements to maintain a safe environment during the build season and at competition events.
Which is it? A Guide or Requirements?  |
I was pressing this point recently: the
competition manual says that "[p]articipants and team mentors
must review the FIRST safety policies and the FIRST Safety Manual..." and "[e]very team
should know, understand and follow the safety rules found in the FIRST Safety Manual" (emphasis added). Apparently, the first quoted sentence is a requirement and the second quoted sentence is a recommendation.
That leads me to believe that the safety manual is intended as a set of recommendations rather than requirements.
1 Note that elsewhere in the competition manual, FIRST has certain explicit safety requirements that are independent of the safety manual. I consider this distinction to be perfectly reasonable: there are some safety-related things which FIRST might like (for entirely valid reasons) which are infeasible to demand, and there are some safety-related things which need to be demanded in order to promote an acceptable level of risk.
By the same token, I realize that event staff have the power and duty to make the competition reasonably safe, and that if they choose to implement the safety manual recommendations, they may be justified in doing so. In that case, they need to realize that they are acting on their own initiative, rather than implementing a mandatory FIRST directive.
1 I realize that given the conflicting use of terms, that this could be interpreted in other ways. I think this one is the most reasonable, given the text and its source (the competition manual), but this isn't a case where the proper interpretation is necessarily obvious.