[blaze8902]

The team I work with has always been far more concerned with facilitating the long term success of the students in the area in a sustainable manner. Our priorities lie in helping everyone we can to achieve their potential.

That said, we care more about helping other teams grow by sharing our designs and resources, and increasing our own success through cooperation with our alliance.

This year we plan on continuing our tradition of maintaining as high a level of transparency as is feasible.

I know many other teams have a different, more competitive, philosophy that differs from our focus on cooperation and provision of resources and information.

To each their own, as long as students are learning and having fun you can approach FIRST however you like, but I believe this year we will maintain transparency.

As a side note, I do find it interesting that our method of pit scouting differs from a few teams who have spoken up in this thread. Rather than newer students, we generally have a mix of students who scout. We like to have mechanically experienced students teach others how to identify a robots capabilities visually, with a focus on asking other teams how their mechanisms work and what design decisions they made. We've found this to be more informative and educational on several fronts.