[jonathan lall]

You think that post was long?

Edward Abbey once said that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” I cannot accept this challenge, not just yet. Not until I'm fully convinced. I don’t dispute the fact that the institution of collaborative manufacturing and design alliances has the opportunity to lead to the creation of very impressive robots and strategy; you need only look at 1114’s – and increasingly the other Triplets’ – downright godlike performance in the last two years. I also don’t dispute the fact that FIRST has positively endorsed collaboration more than once; this has been done via documentation and also in the multitude of awards that individual teams in collaborative alliances have received (including the 2004 Chairman Award, awarded arguably for creating an ambitious collective). Furthermore, I won’t dispute for the purposes of this thread (though it is very debateable) the possibility that in some cases, teams that otherwise wouldn’t have existed do now because another team was willing to take them under its wing by doing all the thinking. I’m a huge fan of some of the team building practices and philosophies that have sprung up as a result of collaboration (take for example the “virtual team” process that Karthik mentioned), and I am consistently impressed by the sponsor enthusiasm garnered by teams in collaborative alliances. On the surface, I am all for collaboration.

But I do dispute the premise that FIRST needs to grow at any cost and as quickly as possible. Mr. Rourke points out that FIRST’s stated goals and Dean's "homework" are all about growth, and then later uses trends of collaborative alliances in the business world as evidence that such an approach is a good thing for FIRST teams, which should strive to mimic this. His position implicitly suggests to me that since FIRST’s growth is good no matter the means, and since collaborative alliances work in the business world, we should use the latter to encourage the former. I’m not so sure I can agree with this. We cannot “forever end the debate on collaboration,” certainly not so soon. Not when FIRST has been growing at a healthy rate without the help of collaborative alliances (to look at percentage growth of FIRST’s annually-increasing size and not factoring in the surrounding system is an erroneous measure), and not when what Ken Wittlief describes as potential “second rate poor cousins” have shown strikingly little team individuality and innovation thus far. JVN is absolutely right when he says that those of us weary of collaboration are weary of how collaboration is carried out procedurally. It is this I am not so sure about, because in theory, I agree almost completely with NiagaraFIRST's philosophy.

Teams are here to learn, cooperate, and indeed help each other, but whether this can apply with the same force to the design stages as it does to the competition is yet to be determined, regardless of what the teams, the Triplets, or even FIRST might tell us. I think some of us might be overlooking the value and personal satisfaction derived from using one’s own intellect to build a product, a team, and a mythology from scratch. Zan Hecht points out that one of the beautiful things about FIRST is that with an identical kit of parts, there are 1000 different solutions to a single problem, and I would add to this by saying that this is due to the individuality and diversity of the young men and women that make up each team. But if FIRST does as some might suggest (not neccesarily Mr. Rourke), the trend of collaboration will represent the biggest change to ever hit FIRST since it moved out of Manchester. I will not liken the practice of collaboration to copying the smart kid’s homework (effectively what some in this thread are doing, in addition to laughably likening it to communism, the Devil, and whatnot), because I don’t believe that is the case at all, but I do believe it has the potential to threaten team individuality and innovation if not carried out properly, and this is not something I can overlook so quickly. Specifically, I cannot endorse a ‘quantity over quality’ ethos, whether explicit or implicit.

Here’s why I say this: once a team that would not otherwise exist is brought into a collaborative alliance to get it on its feet, there are overwhelming factors and social forces that compel it to stay in that role, not the least of which might have been unwittingly outlined by JVN’s excellent analysis where he suggested that that “winning cures all.” A team that wins ‘artificially’ is a team that doesn’t want to leave. If you feed a pigeon a couple times, it becomes dependant. I’m not convinced that this is a healthy growth for FIRST, because if this does occur it will lead to a state of affairs whereein a bunch of collaborative alliances are working against each other. Mr. Rourke gave us an example of a team that is starting off in a collaborative framework (copying a design) and will eventually leave the alliance and build a robot on its own. If this is not just an exception, that is, if that team and other teams that follow do indeed consistently go out and use the success and enthusiasm gained from collaboration to propel them on their own courses, kudos to them, kudos to NiagaraFIRST, and say hello to collaboration’s biggest supporter (me!). This is what NiagaraFIRST seems to be trying to do, but it’s not like they are going to forcibly kick teams out after a certain time, is it? What about the subsequent collaborative alliances we are encouraging here? Stephen Rourke and NiagaraFIRST seem to have the very best of intentions, but that is only so much. If teams become domesticated like pigeons and collaborative alliances end up saturating the field, we will have created a monster in our haste to make FIRST grow. I just don’t think we should be in such a rush.

Right now, collaboration presents us with huge challenges never before seen. There is a quid pro quo mentality that surfaces in the playoff selection process, an implicit obligation to pick the teams in your cooperative (and therefore not other teams) when one of you seeds highly. If we look at teams as unitary actors in an anarchic FIRST system (borrowing an international relations paradigm), there is an erosion of team autonomy never before seen as more and more teams defer authority to a higher cause. There is also the potential that loyalty will trump Gracious Professionalism. This approach also presents all kinds of other problems. What does a team say about itself on its website or to judges, and how does it explain its work to parents (“yeah Mom, do you like it? We designed the wheels and we got everything else from other teams”)? Who do the judges give awards to when a great design comes up? FIRST is not as yet organized to accommodate possible side effects of collaborative alliances, and as a result, I cannot yet provide an endorsement of this solution to FIRST’s alleged growth woes. I see NiagaraFIRST as a promising and so-far successful experiment whose conclusion has not been reached, and I just am not as yet fully convinced that we've waited long enough to call others to work off its projected outcome. Perhaps next year.

Personally, I think specialization is not always a good thing, and that teams should be taking a more holistic approach from a strictly pedagogical perspective, rather than working on (and teaching students to brainstorm about) a specific part of a robot. If NiagaraFIRST and all other rookie cooperatives are a means to that end, then they are a good way to help FIRST grow. I just don't want to create 'domesticated pigeon' teams. If the concept of collaboration is only a temporary step in creating new teams that eventually fly away (okay Jon, kill the metaphor now), I’m all for it, but otherwise, I think it is growth for the sake of growth like Abbey said. We can’t add new teams to FIRST if they aren’t going to truly become new teams, because that undermines a certain element of the experience and the learning.