Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich Kressly
No offense intended, so I won't quote folks above, but ...
Looks like some are focused solely on extrinsic motivators and not looking at the intrinsic. It's pretty easy to look at this as "what FIRST wants" and "they need to provide more feedback to get people to do this" but, if that's where the conversation ends it all seems kind of cheesy to me.
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Forgive my pointedness...
Misquoting aside (and generally speaking), quality feedback in any organization significantly improves the organization's progress towards its goals. How is presentation of a suggestion for more improved feedback cheesy? It's a simple mechanism to accelerate what FIRST wants, no more. If FIRST hired a consulting firm and asked them "how do we accelerate our message to the broader scope of the world?" then I'm sure feedback to existing efforts would be somewhere in the recommendations.
It's easy to say/imply "my team does XYZ because of our own intrinsic ABC and so should every other team". Great job, the first part of that statement is the point of what we do! Yet that fully implied statement misses the point in the fact that currently the only mechanism
FIRST uses to try to motivate teams (CA/EI) is so broad and vague that an FRC team who never visits CD will never understand the scope of their efforts in the broader picture. Thus, encouragement and alignment are simply auxiliary motivators.
Interestingly, half of the outreach we (1885) do is
not FIRST-related or even completely student-oriented*. So even though we probably won't win a CA until we start N # of FLL teams and Y # of extra FTC/FRC teams we will continue to do more FIRST and non-FIRST outreach in order to
quickly spread FIRST's message to a broader scope of people.
*SeaPerch, Rocketry, Cyber Warfare exercises -- why should people who are older than 18 miss out on the culture change?