Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ken Patton (emphasis added)
I empathize with those who are not sold on the collaboration idea, because of where it could lead. This is where we are counting on the great people who are running teams like 1114 to continue to do a great job of staying true to their goals of growing and inspiring without going too far.
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What worries me is those cooperatives that
might surface who
might not follow these ideals. To whom is a collaborative alliance accountable with respect to Ken's statement? Going back to the idea I borrowed from international relations in my earlier post (sorry if you feel a whoosh), on a team this accountability is to FIRST, its ideals, other teams, and its own constituent students and mentors. As a unitary actor in FIRST's eyes, there are quantifiable sanctions for not acting properly. As we create a new level of analysis (that is, the cooperative alliance level), this becomes very blurry and relies more upon the responsibility of those in charge of the alliance. We can all conceive of a cooperative that has 6 teams that go to the same regional, each of whom having six weeks to design only a small fraction of the robot, each of whom pairs up only with another in the finals, where they all face each other. This would be terrible, and would create a huge compulsion for teams to start picking sides (I suppose for rookies I could liken this to the woes of new inmates). Still, my concerns are mainly functional; will teams still have the holistic educational value they used to under this new model? At this very moment, my inclination is to say there are numerous forces that point collaborative alliances away from this, especially if we try to grow into the model with haste.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ken Patton
I would be willing to bet that many people who think collaboration is just fine would change their tune the first time that a team builds two complementary robots (instead of identical robots as we see now). Imagine if a team built one awesome shooter that docked with one awesome feeder-bot. The feeder bot has incredible storage capacity, pushing power, and a collaboratively-designed connection that locks the bots together and allows balls to flow right through. Not simple twins anymore. Siamese twins, one with great eye-hand coordination, and one who has lifted weights his whole life. Sure, you still have to have one of 'em (the "smart" one  ) get to be a picker so it can pick the other one, but we know thats possible. You could call one bot "Gretzky" and the other "Semenko" |
This goes slightly beyond the scope of this thread so I'll be as brief as I can muster. I would argue that the complemetary robot possibility is definitely one of the most intriguing possibilities that might occur, and is one that has not been fully realized. I'd further argue it's fundamentally different from simply sharing an identical design as the Triplets do, because in theory one would only have to neccesarily share and standardize certain dimensions and characteristics while perhaps keeping other aspects unique and/or secret. Teams could cooperate on a very limited basis in terms of design but on a wide scale in terms of participants, and this is just another one of the many side effects we are bound to come across in the future that compel me to reserve judgment on any sort of inter-team collusion and by extension Mr. Rourke's call.
Indeed, people might argue it will further perpetuate a two-tier system of elite versus 'normal' teams. Perhaps it would be too difficult to implement as Bongle suggested, but I disagree. My personal thoughts on the matter go as follows: I see this new mentality of collaboration as an
opportunity. If a few teams were to standardize some mechanism in the first two weeks of the build period, robots that were paired up and followed this regime would be at a decisive advantage, and this is easier to pull off than some might think. I had a defeated idea on my team to make a not-very-mobile but accurate shooter that could plant in position and had receptacles for balls that were similar in size to the corner goals; such a design did one thing very well, and would make all corner goal bots (that is in general, rookie bots) potential shooters and eliminate the possiblity of the opponents shutting them down on D. It was very easy to do in this game, but in a more involved game (say next year's), a collaborative alliance clearly could be beneficial to rookies in this manner without 'giving away' a robot design. This thread is about using collaboration as a means to draw in rookies, and I've just presented one of many possible ways this can be done. Again, this is an
opportunity, but I'm not entirely sure just yet whether it's a good one.