Quote:
Originally Posted by Navid Shafa
How about showing a little of that Gracious Professionalism they were asking the audience members to exhibit...
|
I could also point out longwinded and not particularly constructive comments likening this separation to a divorce, as well as the tendency of many of the questioners to preface a two sentence question with a minute of story time.
Many of the community members could have taken a lesson in gracious professionalism from the people on stage. The panel never failed to answer questions respectfully, even when those questions were only partially veiled personal attacks.
The valid points made by many of the community members present were overshadowed by their combatative phrasing. I find it unfortunate that the community seems to have used this meeting more as a time to vent at the higher ups in FIRST than to engage in a constructive dialogue about the future of this program that we all hold so dear.
I love this program, and I'm not a fan of the two championships concept, but watching this meeting was incredibly frustrating for me, watching people that I hold in incredibly high esteem behaving in ways that remind me more of bickering children than of people out to change our world. The entire world is not your team, and we all have distinct challenges and advantages. It's very important in my opinion to look at the championship split in the greater context of a growing FRC program and FIRST's stated goals-- districts in the US (and probably eventually elsewhere), the desire to keep the current feel of championships as more than just the FRC World Championship, and the likelihood of an eventual three-tiered model similar to FTC. From a road-map perspective, this is the inevitably awkward transition stage as we move FRC from a widely-spread but still mostly unknown competition to a fixture both in the USA and the world. A few years of dual championships is a price I'm willing to pay while we wait for our state, national, and global programs to mature to a point where can truly say that our championship is the superbowl of smarts.