At what point does it become unacceptable for a mentor to design/build the robot

[Ivan Malik]

TL;DR: It is actually HEALTHY for debates like this to happen. Let syncretism happen.

Originally Posted by pfreivald

Sticking our collective noses into how other people choose to run their teams is almost definitely destructive in terms of the larger culture, and I can't imagine how it would accomplish anything whatsoever in terms of how that team chooses to organize itself...

I'm going to assume that my audience is engineers who have never really looked at how culture is looked at by people who study it. If this is wrong I am sorry. (this is not meant to sound condescending or snooty)

There are two ways in which an idea or custom is controlled in society, in the simplest sense: by a governing authority or by social pressure. With the debate of primarily mentors built vs primarily student built, FIRST proper (aka dean, woody, etc.) has never issued any sort of ruling on the matter. It is rather safe to say that they are the governing authority of FIRST at large. Their silence means that it is up to the rest of the FIRST community to form some sort of tacit or un-tacit construct that controls this idea among the community at-large. This will happen either with a conscious community effort or naturally without any conscious control of it by the community.

Conscious control requires a way for people from all over the community to be able to communicate with one another. Hence why threads like this crop up every season on chief delphi. This is the method that the FIRST community has chosen to "take the temperature" of where the social construct currently stands. Threads like this re-evaluate what is thought of as "acceptable" on the larger scale of FIRST. It is actually HEALTHY for debates like this to happen. If they do not, a general community consensus is not reached and their become sub-groups within the larger FIRST community. This is bad because when these groups need to work together on something (like the concept of GP, spread of the district system, or the spread of STEM to the rest of society) they will focus on their differences and get nothing accomplished. If you would like examples of this PM me, because history is rife with them. The alternative is the tacit acceptance of the ideas laid in the past that are either accepted or the person/group is shunned. Let syncretism happen.

If you want to talk about something that is harmful to FIRST culture at large, talk about the different approaches that the community takes with regard to mentor involvement at the different levels of FIRST. 3/4 levels, the less mentor involvement the better the team is viewed; you get to FRC and its chaos. No wonder students who have progressed through all the stages of FIRST are confused about what a mentor's role is. The proof for that is looking at who asks the initial question in threads like this, often it's current or former students.

FIRST is a culture. Start thinking about it in terms of a culture and less as an organization.