FIRST Choice is Profoundly Flawed

[Taylor]

Originally Posted by PiltdownMan

FIRST Choice has served and continues to serves my team very poorly. We have never gotten anything particularly useful from the FIRST Choice program (FC). For the last 4 weeks there certainly has been little available that we can use on the designs for the current season. That is because the things that we could use to actually compete with are provided in such small numbers that we can’t get them. So now we have 100 FC points that are essentially worthless.

FIRSTChoice first opened back in December. It's a first-come-first-serve program. This is well-documented and well-advertised. Why did you wait until mid-January to start looking for parts? Are you shopping for Christmas trees now too?

The bottom line is we now need to stop worrying about what we need for a given year’s competition and choose the most valuable/scarcest items. We have to indulge in bad engineering, bad sportsmanship, bad logistics just to compete. Not gracious/not professional.

I'm trying, but I just don't see how you get from the first sentence to the second. Why would you order parts you won't need/won't use?

FIRST needs to design a system that makes more sense or redesign the FC system. They could set up a rotation system wherein the choice of the high value targets is limited over time or some other such concept.

They already do exactly this. Some of the parts were available in December; other parts were rotated in after kickoff.

(I personally would be less offended if the program was killed and we just had to buy those items. At least it would be an honest system. I would be happy to contribute ideas or time to solving it. It has already occupied too much of my time.)

What's stopping you, or any other team, from purchasing what you need? Most everything on FIRSTChoice is available to the public.

I agree with Glenn, there are flaws with the program if it is viewed as a KoP program. But that's not what it really is. FIRSTChoice is a way for companies to support teams by giving away free stuff, but these companies have neither the inventory nor the inclination to donate to each team. So when the parts run out, it's kind of by design.