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Originally Posted by asid61
By "the community" do you mean FRC people or parents/ kids etc? Because every year we do get input from parents and such during design reviews, but many ideas suggested show a sever lack of experience doing this sort of mechanical stuff (we have plenty of electrical engineers, though).
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By "the community" we mean the community. That is, we send out invitations to public officials and specific people or organizations whom we want to come, and we publicize the event widely with an open invitation to anyone who wants to show up. We usually get parents, old engineers, representatives from local sponsors, old team members, naval technicians from our local naval base, possibly state legislatures, other public officials, and people from the general community. Experience combines with common sense in the discussion after the presentations, and there is a Q/A session immediately after the presentations that allows for dynamic input from the design groups.
Our first two years, we decided on robot design without the community and great ideas were passed over by either the mentors lack of faith in the design of the students (which appeared in many robots at competition) or the popularity of the people on one of the design groups. Presenting to the community allows for widespread discussion as well as removal from team biases. It is also a great way to involve the community with FIRST