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Originally Posted by nparikh
Wow, it seems that this thread is spreading into so many different directions that I don't really know which issue to respond to.
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Agreed, especially since I haven't been posting on CD lately. That said, the one question that bothers me the most:
What constitutes an ethical violation?
As we've seen in YMTC threads and many of the posts here, whether or not something wrong was done depends heavily on your point of view and the circumstances. Because of that, the levels of punishment being suggested for different acts varies accordingly.
In fact, I'm starting to think that having any kind of punishment at all may not be a good idea.
Let's look at my team for an example. Team 818 has prided itself on playing by the rules in FIRST. We've never begun our work on designing or building the robot until after kickoff. We don't take parts out of competitions to work on them. We've never, ever done anything to gain an unfair advantage or to harm the chances of another team to the best of my knowledge.
BUT...
Last year, we ended up running behind schedule. By the time my programming group got the finished robot, we had less than a week before the ship date and no autonomous. We knew that there was going to be no way to finish it with the real robot.
What we did instead was we made a "fake robot," if you will. It was a chassis with wheels, motors for the wheels, and weights piled on top to simulate the weight of the actual robot. This "robot" was used so we could finish our autonomous code. We did complete the code in time for our first competition; however, the motors on the actual robot had a different balance than did the practice ones. We didn't switch the motors. Instead, we redid the code and fought with it for three days to finally get it working.
There's nothing in FIRST's rulebook that forbids building a second robot for practicing, or that says that we can't work on our code after the robot has shipped. I don't think that what we did was even remotely wrong, and I'd hope that most in the FIRST community would agree.
Still...did working on our code violate the build season period even though we didn't have any part of the actual robot to do it with? Was building the frame wrong because not every team has the resources to do that? Let's say we were punished for doing this - would the punishment be the same as it would be for a team who builds two identical robots, one solely for practicing (as I know some teams in our area do)? Should it be?
And how do we know what acts are "worse" than others? Is taking a part home from competition to work on it as bad as working on it before the kickoff or after the ship date?
I think that my thoughts are starting to border on a form of existentialism, and I'm not entirely sure how I'd respond to any given incident. All that I've realized is that there isn't any one right way to look at problems such as the ones discussed here.
The best solution may be to have the community judge itself. If something happens at a regional, say, why not let the mentors of the other attending teams decide what punishment is best? How about a "commisioner review" system like the ones in place in sports, where someone in FIRST (Dave?) reviews the situation and chooses a fitting consequence?
There isn't an easy answer to this question, or even a "best" one. If FIRST is to continue to thrive and - more importantly - stick to its ideals, we'll need to find some way to solve the problem.