[Paul Copioli]

I have supported the 254/60 collaboration from the start. With that said, I obviously agree with the FIRST ruling.

Collaboration will not reduce your workload by 50%. Effective collaboration is not easy. Collaboration is not for everyone. Team 217 will probably not collaborate in the future, because we have a very large team which is hard to manage.

For those of you that do not support collaboration, let me leave you with this scenario:

Here is team A (the ThunderChickens, for example) with several CNC mills, lathes, grinders, etc at their disposal. Also, they have 14 CAD workstations with SolidWorks and a 36" laser plotter. They can design and build pretty much anything they want. They also have several software mentors and students that are awesome at C programming.

Here are teams B and C. Team B has an awesome machine shop that has CNC mills, etc. They have no CAD design to speak of (everything on a napkin), but they have mad software writing skills. Team C has design workstations and students who can run them, but no high tech machining capability. Teams B & C team up to do a collaborative effort. Together they design some simple parts, some complicated parts, and some parts in between. They divide the machining up by who has the ability to machine each part, they divide the software development up based on who has the ability, and they divide the detail design (not concepting) by who has the ability. The result is the combined capacity to do what team A can do by themselves. With the ruling on cost to machine not counting against teams, we may even machine parts for people in the future.

I, personally like to be in the team A situation. If I wasn't, you bet we would collaborate with another team that matched our weaknesses with strengths.

-Paul