FIRST's statement on Einstein

[lemiant]

Over-all we've had an awesome season and I've documented much of its awesome-ness here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=106240 . However I have many issues with how Einstein was handled, and after giving myself a bit of time to catch my breath I thought I would add my thoughts to the debate:

Let’s start off this way. While I love FIRST and I know that it is an incredible organization, and while I will continue to support it in the future... I believe that they messed up, REALLY bad! Almost every aspect of how Einstein was handled was wrong in my mind and FIRST has some serious fixing to do. We can look at all sorts of impacts, but the one I am most familiar with is what it did to our team. We were the first rookie team to make Einstein since 2009, but the night after that monumental accomplishment there was not a smile to be found. We are starting to get over it, but for the first few days, that screw up overshadowed everything else about the championship in the place it matters most... the hearts of the students.

The mistakes started at the beginning of the season and many people have talked about them already: FIRST really should have stopped considering themselves infallible and implemented proper troubleshooting as soon as the problems surfaced; They also should have had more contingencies to deal with the problem.

Their next step was the one thing I applaud them for. When the first two matches on Einstein went bad, FIRST did the right thing and replayed them (I was really surprised by the amount of cheering when they announced this). However the thing that gets me is that, to the best of our knowledge, nothing was actually done to fix the field between that and the next match. What FIRST actually did to try and fix the problem is something we can only speculate about, because there was, and still is, very little transparency about what happened.

Once it was readily apparent that the next set of matched had gone no better, FIRST decided that they would power through anyways and crown a champion regardless of the fact that all of the matches were more heavily influenced by the field than any other single factor. At this point FIRST should have called it. Our entire alliance was standing there incredulous when they announced that the scores from SF2-1 would stand. I believe that if they cannot provide a field that is fair for all of the teams and lives up to the specs they provided, then FIRST should have stopped playing matches until they could, in this case that would have meant crowning all 4 alliances world champions. It’s rather bold of me to suggest that we should have been given that honor, and I think our team already had so much good luck going for us that we really have nothing to complain about. However it is absolutely ridiculous for FIRST to suggest that our two incredible alliance partners, 1114/2056, deserved to lose those matches in the way they did. Since there is no validity to the matches that went down on Einstein I really wonder why FIRST insisted on holding them at all.

Regardless I would like to extend my congratulations to 25, 16, 180, 233, 987, 207, 118, 548 and 2194 who all built incredible machines and worked extremely hard to get to Einstein. Despite my opinion, given what actually happened, I recognize that there is no way to go back and make everyone world champions, as much as I wish there was.

Throughout it was surprising and insulting that FIRST kept pretending there wasn’t a problem. Our driver already addressed this in another post so I won’t harp on it http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...&postcount=182

I may also be in the minority of people who are not content with FIRST’s apology. In my mind given such a monumental failure I would expect something more than a statement which basically boils down to “sorry for the inconvenience”. Maybe:

“We recognize that we screwed up big time. Our apologies to everyone at the championship event and to the Einstein teams in particular for what happened on the Einstein field. Our FMS failed in a way we did not expect and significantly lowered the quality of play as well as affecting the outcome of the championship event. We deeply regret what happened and will not allow it to happen again”

Followed by opening a website to detail the results of their investigation into the field failure, which was immediately populated with the error logs from the Einstein field along with full information about the inner workings of the field electronics. In addition there would have to be pre-set deadlines for further reporting. To deal with the damage that has already been done, I'm a big fan of giving all the Einstein teams qualification and free registration, but I’m rather too biased for that to hold much weight. Something to remember though, is that collectively the 12 of us paid $60,000 dollars to attend the event (nevernmind the registration of everyone watching) and got a completely ganked product. If this was the real world, FIRST would be giving a full refund and doing some serious damage control (remember Toyota?).

FIRST has a massive black eye and the only way to move past it is admitting it and making serious changes. Something they haven’t done so far, but which I still hope will happen soon.

That’s a lot of text, but it's all part of a season which was awesome for us personally! But in which, the organization itself screwed up bad. I’m still fully behind their mission, and if they get their act together, as I have faith such an intelligent group of individuals will, then I forgive everything and fully support their organization as well.

Here’s to an even better 2013!

- Alex