Quote:
Originally Posted by Karthik
Both? Sorry to be non committal, but I see both good and bad from this variance. On the positive side, you get a lot of different types of teams competing for Chairman's at the Championship. As has been stated by many wise people over the years, there's no "right" way to run an FRC team. Thus the way the system has evolved allows multiple types of teams to be rewarded. I like that. Now on the negative side, there is a lack of consistency from region to region. I can see how that would be frustrating for a submitting team who hasn't had much success within their own region.
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It's a point I've wavered on pretty regularly in the past with frequency in the wave of personal opinion increasing significantly around the 15 week crunch. Asking someone from a team who
very, very likely has a much deeper perspective of the award than myself I wanted to see if I would get a different response.
I try to take a very unconventional approach to going through the submission process, taking various abstract concepts of voice, history, and culture and calling it identity. The current result of judging variances linked to geography does get different kinds of teams competing for the award, which is great! I understand the idea of different standards exist with respect to geography. Just like how you can point to x areas of FIRST's footprint to find markedly better robotic ability, you can point to y areas and see higher standards to win the award than the global average.
I express confusion when it comes to wholly different perspectives on the meaning of the award, where regions will heavily weight certain topics and nearly discard some others. As someone who tries to keep up with what all different kinds of teams are doing, I can picture the identity of a role model team at the CCA and RCA levels. It's hard for me to explain (which probably explains why I don't perceive the award being judged this way), but you see teams and you know they are unequivocally the best team in the venue. Yet they miss out on the award because the goalposts get moved not just north and south, but frequently to the east and west.
The TLDR is that I like the idea of getting unique teams together to present for the CCA, but I lean towards the perception that the system gets there in an incomplete and inconsistent method that cheapens the results at the expense of other teams and maybe even FIRST overall.
As a PS of sorts, I wonder if judges take into consideration how they award Chairman's one year at an event can carry a lasting effect on how teams operate themselves for the next 3-6 years.