Is there usually this much frustration?

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by Marc S.

Please elaborate...

Are you saying something is wrong with the game, or how FIRST is financed

Well both, I didn't want to say too much, but it seems this year has seemed less professional than previous years.

At kickoff the initial crio updates first didn't exist and then were corrupted once I got them.

Then we had the banebots issues.

Now there's having CAN issues.

Only a chunk of the events are participating in the Twitter feed, which I was told my FIRST staff would be formally supported, and made many decisions based on that.

Inconsistencies across the board with regionals and rules.

Again if they focused less on throwing huge 300k events and focused on the actual business side to the organization, we may see a better result. If FIRST formally handled the distribution of KOP-related items (specifically transmissions) rather than letting some young tiny company do it, we may have seen a better result. rather than outsourcing the code development to a few people at NI and WPI, actually have a full-time team responsible for producing industry-standard software, with professional releases.
I would actually prefer to see FIRST invest in the staff to formally support it, rather than rely on volunteer work.

FRC costs 24 million dollars to pull off, however my fear is that too little of that money is spent on a formal staff and training. FRC is getting huge but it still loses 10% of its every year for many reasons, money being a huge one. There are other models (note Jim's comments) for having great regionals at a fraction of the cost and WPI is working on a model to reflect this for other areas. However none of this is done via investments by FIRST, its volunteer based. Actually FIRST to an extent has opposed this agenda to make it more affordable.

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

In Michigan, we produce our own events locally for as low as $10,000 each. We now run all 10 of our Michingan events for less than the cost of a single traditional FRC regional. FRC Events don't need to be expensive, but they will be if you use the standard model.
If you have an issue with event and program costs, follow our lead. These things can be changed.
The key to sustainable growth in FRC depends on 2 things:
1. reducing the price of entry.
2. increasing return on investment for participation.

The Michigan model is awesome. It seems like the obvious choice.
I think FIRSTs ego is getting in the way of formally adopting this
(IMO they view it as a step back)

Its a shame that many of the actions to better FIRST and make FIRST more affordable, scalable, and achievable are not actually a product of the FIRST organization, but rather states and universities who realize the model has a lot of room for improvement.