[bEdhEd]

TL;DR

If your volunteers are affiliated with your team and they are model graciously professional members of the FIRST community, then integrity/bias and conflict of interest should not be an issue. As far as I can tell, it would be pretty hard to form a staff of volunteers at an event where none of them are affiliated with ANY of the teams, especially champs. It's logistically impractical.

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Members of my team who are parents or graduated students tend to do a lot of volunteering at local and distant events inside and outside FRC, including myself.

Sometimes we have too many 701 affiliated volunteers. I think one dilemma this season that I was discussing with our head coach is that we nearly had all 701 affiliated referees at a regional we would be attending. This is because our members are so eager to referee! Obviously we as a team, and the regional planners, would no allow that. I think it was Sacramento. It's not unusual to have a couple 701 affiliated referees - and sometimes head referee - at a regional we attend (mainly Sacramento and Central Valley) since these regionals are ones we attend regularly if not annually.

When we have a distant regional, we might have a referee or two from our team come with us because they volunteered at that regional for the convenience of coming with the team to the event.

I've never had integrity problems with our affiliated referees. They're super professional, and will not hesitate to call a well deserved foul on our own alliance. If they seem shady, then I'd have to address it personally. But again, this has never been a problem and I am confident that it will never be.

Refereeing an event that has an affiliated team on the roster doesn't have to be a problem, provided that the team's affiliated referee is absolutely GP and doesn't play favorites. This goes for any other volunteer position like inspection and queuing, which we also tend to have a high rate of 701 affiliated volunteers active in such positions. We just like to give back and contribute to the success of a well-run regional.

Now think about this: how many volunteers do you expect to be team affiliated at any given event? Well, if they're volunteering for an FRC event, chances are that they are! If there is a volunteer not team affiliated, then they have to had been contacted by someone from FIRST as an outsider (this is probably most common for judges), has gained a personal interest in the organization and is affiliated with NO teams whatsoever, or is affiliated with a team not attending. This would be impossible at champs, and the only way to keep volunteers away from their own teams at champs is to assign them to a different division.

Logistically, it would be quite impractical to plan an event where all the volunteers are unaffiliated. If this sort of event were to be planned, the first case is that volunteers would probably have to be contacted if they are not a part of FIRST since they may not be aware of event dates as compared to someone actively on a team. As mentioned, I usually see this case with judges. We even sometimes have a few 701 affiliated judges, and we don't let them talk to our team, so sometimes the choices of judges to talk to is further limited for us. It's great that we can provide our own members to judge, but it can get frustrating seeing someone in blue in the pits, and then realizing that they're one of your own and you gotta ignore them.

The other case is that the volunteer has to come from a team that is outside the region or is not attending. Finding the people out of the area willing to volunteer is not as easy as finding people from the area that are active in FIRST, and likely have a team competing at their respective event to which they are a volunteer. This is my own speculation of course, so anyone should correct me if I'm wrong.