Quote:
Originally Posted by fuzzy1718
Best way to deal with a politician, make them mad enough to trip over there own words, so you can actualy find out what they are saying. Since everyone I have talked to about the subject has acted like a politician and side stepped my questions. Why not use the same tactics.
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Wow, Now we are being compared to politicians....when do we get the perks? Where is my private jet and my limo? When do I get to go to Camp David?
Try to remember all this is being done by volunteers, not paid politicians.
For anyone who bothered to listen there was information about this presented at an earlier time. There was an open discussion on this concept at the South East Michigan Feedback forum I attended on May 14th, 2008. It seems that some of the teams who chose to skip this meeting are the ones who are voicing surpirse.
Again, As soon as the details of this proposal were appoved by FIRST, it was made public. This was not done in October, December, or even January, as with other past FIRST changes.....this was done in JULY. It was very deliberate to get this out as soon as humanly possible.
Prior to some of the preliminary approvals, there was not much to discuss in public. As Jason Morella revealed earlier in this thread, other cost reduction proposals have been made in other areas in the past, and these ideas never went forward. Who knew about these? Probably only the originators since the ideas died on the table.
If someone had called a state-wide meeting in May to discuss this (OH Wait, someone did!), who would have come? I'll tell you that the teams who would have come were the teams that were there. Anyone who complains about not being included needs to remember that there is a big difference between having an opnion and being involved. Everyone has an opnion, and many opinions oppose one another. The group who worked on this plan attempted gather data and opnion from many teams and many sources. I assure you that this is not a single idea simply pushed through. It is the output of the results of evalutating HUNDREDS of ideas and many, many hours of discussion and data analysis. Many of the decisions behind this were very data-driven. To quote Jim Licinski of Google - "Data beats opnion every time".
Anyone who thinks that the status quo is fine, and that nothing needs to be changed; you are wrong. The current situation is that the Michigan Region does not have enough regional capacity to support our current volume of teams. There is not enough sponsor money to fund the events we currently have, let alone to add more if the traditional regional cost model is used. Lst time I checked our state economy was 49th out of 50, so finding a big pile of new sponsor money is unlikely, and believe me, people are trying. Many teams in our state want to expand their involvement to more than one event and they cannot without prohibitive travel costs since there is not enough local capacity. All of this is a problem even with zero growth. No one from FIRST had a solution, so some very dedicated people here devised one.