Quote:
Originally Posted by George Nishimura
I don't see a proposed standard in his post. To me it's more the fact that FIRST should question, and account for, any decision that could cause several experienced mentors to leave the program.
FIRST can make a decision that causes that, but they have to recognise the cost of such a decision up front. We are all worse off if FIRST continue an approach where they only realize the repercussions of important decisions after the damage has been done.
The best way to avoid making any decision that could ostracize valuable members of the community is to keep an open dialogue with [at least] a subset of the community, especially before committing to an important decision.
An outline of the vision in the short, medium and long-term would also help put their decisions in to perspective, so we're not trying to reverse-engineer their thinking to understand decisions that contradict our previously held beliefs about their vision. Especially when this is such a community driven organisation.
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Eric's statement expressed disbelief that FIRST would consider any decision that caused mentors to leave. My point is that, with as many mentors as there are now, there's no major decision that FIRST can make around the competition schedule that won't cause mentors to leave. (I take Eric's POV as more representative than many of the commenters here, based on the team he's affiliated with.)
Let me give you an example. Some of the proposals floated around on this and other threads propose a 5 or 6 event schedule for a team, if they go all the way. That sort of schedule, if adopted, will certainly cause mentors to leave because it's too much time. Yet the only time "mentors leaving" gets discussed in these threads is over the change from "one true championship" to "two championships," and its motivational effect on teams.
I agree with your statements that FIRST needs to carefully consider the impacts of changes that it makes. At the same time, giving a small number of mentors veto power over changes will make it very difficult to make decisions. And I totally get where you're coming on reverse engineering their thinking, being one of the chief practitioners of that particular art in these threads. There are clearly many more factors going into this decision than what has been presented publicly. I suspect this is a decision that needed to be made now, and with everything else that goes on during competition season got as much communication effort as they could. (Couldn't resist more reverse engineering).
Can you point specifically to where FIRST is ostracizing members of the community as part of this decision? I see where there are differences of opinion regarding the means to achieve goals, but haven't seen any ostracism.