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Re: Multiples 2007
I know Allison and Matt have explained our reasons already, but I just wanted to put in my 2 cents…
As Rich said, judging anything from a distance is dangerous. Yeah, people on my team were against our collaboration, others agreed to it only because of Chairman's, and of course, there were others that truly understood FIRST and agreed to it because they wanted to see all three teams succeed, but we voted, the majority were for working with the others and I'm very proud of my team for that decision.
It's hard to judge from the sidelines the extent of a collaboration. As president, I was at the school for the first part of build, and didn't get to see anything first-hand. I got lots of complaints at first, but after a week, those same people came to me and told me about how much they liked it and how cool they thought the robot would look, since the people on the other team had some great ideas. I don’t know of anyone that was actually working with the other teams didn’t love the collaboration efforts.
And it wasn’t at all like one team was doing all of the work for the rest either, we split up into groups by what part of the robot we were working on rather than what team we were on, and made sure one person from each team was in each group. I know this might sound stale, but we really did work like we were one team by the end of build. At the competitions, one person from 515 and 1447 will be working in our pit, and one person from 226 will be in theirs.
I can see where all of the arguments against collaborations are coming from, but I'm really glad my team was part of this effort this year. The more teams succeed, the better it is for FIRST and the rest of us.
~Smita
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