Some changes needed at FIRST IMO

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

I love alot of things FIRST has been doing in the last few years Bag and tag being a good example going in the right direction. But we are now so large, we are exausting the worlds supply of many items. We need to evolve, FIRST should announce all allowed motors and electronics and other nongame items one year in advance. This would greatly reduce the cost for many first teams and help rookie teams find items where now all they see is out of stock on everything they need.

I'm not averse to letting it be known when I think FIRST (or its affiliates) screw up. But I'm not convinced that this is the solution, or even that this is an appropriate definition of the problem.

Perhaps FIRST needs to have a discussion (either internally or within the broader community) about the degree to which supply restrictions are intended to be part of the challenge, and the degree to which FIRST should be responsible for remedying, or perhaps more realistically, equalizing the impact on teams.

After all, it wasn't so long ago that FRC rules mandated that all non-kit parts come from a (short) additional hardware list, or from the Small Parts (now Amazon Supply) catalogue. While that was great in some respects—it was an established supplier with a largely deterministic supply chain—there were unforeseen difficulties like economically and rapidly importing those parts to Canada during an FRC build season. Was it FIRST's responsibility to do something about that, or was it just part of the challenge that 188 should have anticipated? It's hard to say.

What is certain is that if FIRST is going to establish any premises about the role of supply constraints, they should be clear about them, and clear about their purpose. The vendor definition in the rulebook is much better than it used to be, but I see it as fundamentally off the mark. It adequately specifies how to verify that an ordinary business is a legal vendor—but there wasn't really much question about those in the first place. The problem is that it fails to cohesively establish how to deal with a vendor that suddenly fails to meet the requirements. Should the vendor be punished or shunned? (How?) Should the team be punished or at least made to realize their error? (That's not very nice, and perhaps only inspiring in the crudest of ways.) Should FIRST bend over backward to accommodate them, even to the extent of bending a rule, or tracking down an alternative supplier? (Impractical if widespread.)

I think there's real value in the surprise aspect of the competition, and FIRST needs to continue to be thoughtful about how it leverages that. There's also value in the self-containedness of the season; announce everything early, and you create a great incentive to operate year-round, because of the certainty involved. We'll probably see more design re-use (something that FIRST has managed poorly, due to consistent use of unclear constraints), and more team member burnout as a result. But we might also see many much better robots. I'm not sure if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, because I don't think FIRST or the FIRST community have coherently established what they believe the metrics for this are.

Given that it doesn't seem to be especially urgent that change happen right now, let's have that discussion, before settling prematurely on a solution.

Originally Posted by tcjinaz

In the real world, market demand pricing rules. With the compressed time frame, an auction based model for the donated material is a reality lesson. Give us some "FIRST Bucks" and let us price what we need as we see fit. The government/leadership fixed price model has proven to be a failure every time out. Let's teach the kids about the real world.

Is FIRST about the "real world", or about a world with certain limiting assumptions? After all, in the real world, you can bribe a regulator to get what you want—hopefully this isn't something that FIRST strives to emulate.

As for the issue of price controls, it's not inherently a government issue—it's an issue of market failure in general, which can occur as a result of regulatory constraints, monopolies, uninformed consumers, etc.. From an economic perspective, the better lesson is to learn how to identify a market failure, no matter who's to blame. The solution isn't to assume that a price control is inherently a bad thing—especially in a market like FRC, which is clearly not entirely free.

Originally Posted by tcjinaz

The point I was getting at was that the "prices" on FIRST Choice were not market prices. They were predicted values by some who were knowing, but not fully informed about the demand for the product in the marketplace. Combined this with a first to the post purchasing arrangement (compounded by electronic topological locality advantages), and you have a warped market that generally occurs only when governments try to interfere with free markets. If things were right, the prices of the current leftovers on FIRST Choice would be much lower. Instead, there is remaining inventory at fixed prices. Some items disappeared faster than the sales system could be corrected .Why anyone would want a flawed cable (from last year) priced for more than the shipping price escapes me, but maybe someone will take it (bigger fool theory).

By the time that kickoff occurs, the number of teams are known, and the amount of donated support is known. Let's have a free market lesson. Every team bought in to the pot with the same amount. They each get the same amount to spend on the donated hardware and services. Open a true auction for the available goods & services, and let it run for a week. No dependencies on the quality or location of Internet services, or on the real time abilities of the order entry system. And this washes out this year;s problems with the ordering system. Here's a hook to get eBay involved with FIRST.

This comes closer to the real world than the current setup. The customer offers the most for what they think is most valuable. The supplier sorts through the demand for their product, and either declines or accepts some business, by their standards of profitability. The demand side assesses the relative merits of what is available to and bids accordingly. Oh, look, there's an auction.

In this example, I again wonder if FIRST's intention is to emulate a market-driven interaction, or to do something else with fundamentally different objectives. It wouldn't be surprising if FIRST instead felt some duty to maximize equity or utility, rather than maximize profit.

In the case of equity—because it's a competition, and we typically recognize equity as one of the prime virtues of a well-orchestrated competition—FIRST might be attempting to set prices to ensure parity, instead of pricing in response to demand. This isn't profit-maximizing, but I don't think they particularly care.

Alternatively, in the case of utility, FIRST might be motivated to tailor the competition "to each according to his need". This is viable if they have a good model of need—but may well fail if they don't really understand the contingencies upon which need is based. That failure wouldn't be an indictment of need-based service delivery, so much as an indictment of ill-informed policymaking. It's an open question whether it's even practical for FIRST to possess the knowledge needed to make policy on the basis of actual need—but that's worth exploration in detail rather than dismissal out of hand.

Originally Posted by tcjinaz

Being the taciturn engineer that I am, I posited a position in four sentences instead of four paragraphs.

Nobody ever accused me of being that kind of engineer.