[Tristan Lall]

Any deadline change would result in some sort of disparity between this team and all of the others—of course, receiving the KOP late is a significant disparity in its own right, especially for a rookie team which is likely to have depended on its contents to perform even cursory design and prototyping work.

Something like this should depend on why the delay occurred. If the team was allowed to register after the deadline as a courtesy, there may not have been enough time to handle the logistics. On the other hand, if they were not a late registrant, I think FIRST should probably have anticipated that shipping might not be straightforward. Assuming the team registered on time, and is paying for shipping (as teams can do, if they're not picking it up at a kickoff event), timely receipt of their materials would be a wholly reasonable expectation.

There's also the question of whether someone didn't fill out the required forms or customs manifests, or didn't do so in the right language—it's not improbable that the team and/or FIRST could have made an innocent error there. I'm not sure how Bosnia handles these things, but even when dealing with Canada-U.S. shipping, it's important to itemize the contents, indicate the value, and describe the expected use (especially if not for resale).

I suspect this is one of those times when you want to just pay a customs broker to handle everything for you—if that's what FIRST did, and it still arrived late, there's probably not much that can be done, except to ship earlier next year.

I wouldn't be opposed to a short extension, if it was clear (to FIRST) that this wasn't the team's own fault, but a full 11 days is a bit too optimistic. If FIRST is unwilling to contemplate the possibility of an extension of any sort, then perhaps a partial refund is in order—certainly at least the cost of shipping.


Now, on the subject of late kit arrivals every year, that's simply unacceptable. When you understand the problem (because it happened last year), and still can't avoid it, you're doing it wrong.

In terms of a long-term resolution to this issue, maybe there could be a note in the list of deadlines explaining that registrants from outside North America who haven't paid by early November should not expect their KOP to arrive in-country by the kickoff date. If the registrants do pay early, FIRST would have an extra month to put together an early shipment of whatever KOP parts it has on hand at that point, and the team would get the bulk of its materials on time. At least this way, the teams would be forewarned, and have the option to resolve it. (It's not totally fair, because they'd have to raise funds faster than everyone else, but at least it doesn't interfere with the build season.)