[Ken Patton]

One thing that teams who are submitting Beta-test proposals could do - and I promise I will look for it in evaluating proposals - is to clearly show how they are going to make it better for the new teams to get running without the major efforts that the Beta-test teams will be devoting to this. That would help to address the concerns of people who think there might be some advantage. If new teams can go through the Beta-test primers and get up in running in less time than it took the Beta-testers themselves (after all, the inital problems ideally would be solved in Beta-test), that will be an advantage to the new teams.

Beta-test teams need to think of the valuable pieces of the puzzle - solutions and instructive steps that will be needed by all teams - and then put together a proposal that will address those puzzle pieces. Think of the features needed in our robots. There are a lot of areas where good solutions will be of value to many teams.

There are going to be areas where proposals might overlap, and it seems to me that if teams did a great job of documenting solutions, we could get away with less overlap.

Ken