[Big Ideas]

Thanks for everyone's contributions and thoughts on this. I believe that Districts would be a benefit to my teams and the teams I help sponsor in the so cal area. I also very much appreciate the volunteer community getting our act together so when a FIRST conversation does happen, we will be ready and not railroaded into actions that are not in our bests interests. Now for the rambling thoughts that have been collecting.

1) Has FIRST made any comment in an official/non capacity to these 2 proposal threads? Rick Sick is the only FIRST person that has contributed. But, as a Senior Mentor he is still on the volunteer side.

2) Is it a "California" proposal for a particular reason? East to define? Political? Easy for the legal aspects?

I appreciate the willingness to treat Nor Cal and So Cal as needing their own considerations. Do we NEED to carry the 2 areas forward together? Is it better to discuss the areas actions separately? For timing? Workload? Necessity? Personally I think that the combined discussion is best and I would love action to be taken together but I would not want the best solutions to fail because of any artificial requirements imposed but not needed.

3) We need to strengthen the section regarding requests to and discussion from CA FIRST staff. At some point we actually have to deal with FIRST; expanding the discussion outside of the volunteer community. FIRST depends VERY heavily on its volunteer base. This discussion is an opportunity to help FIRST support our community better. And in turn, we can support the students better.

4) I am actually a BIT uncomfortable using the FIRST logo on the proposal. Because, this is the work of volunteers that have no corporate standing in FIRST. I would be happy with a contributors list showing every single team that has entered the discussion as an exotension to the authors list currently on the front cover.

5) I think we need to strengthen the section on Volunteer needs. Thanks for adding the spreadsheet of volunteers and roles. It was great that we have already identified Volunteer recruitment/development/coordination as a major need that requires considerable work from the volunteer community as well as FIRST. Its nice to see that action is already happening in this regard. Thanks Joe Petito for putting Inspector development into Off Season Event plans. I will be working on similar development for San Diego events.

6) Discussions pointed out that the Volunteer Coordinator was possibly the most important key role for event success. Random question--Would events be better if the Volunteer Coordinator was a paid position? Possibly idea would be a VC for each of the fields, assuming fields are planned to ship as locally as possible then the VC would have a solid handle on all the available volunteers and KEY volunteers within reasonable distance of multiple events.

If I struck some interest (or a nerve) please add your thoughts. --Steve