Seating Lottery?

[jvriezen]

I am absolutely convinced that any significant 'improvement' to the seating issues will require a strong incentive to make use of 'crowd' scouting and then relegating teams that don't participate in crowd scouting to some of the least desirable seats. Seating priority during qualifications (if done via signage or otherwise enforced) should be something along these lines (The priority order could be argued a bit but not much, in my opinion.)

1. VIPs/major event sponsors.
2. Teams in current match, red section, blue section (limited to capped seat count, large teams just deal with it) Maybe 6x30 seats. Traffic flow signage could be arranged so that cheering squads can self-queue and quickly swap out between matches without formal volunteers.
3. Crowd-scouts 36 seats total.
4. Public not closely associated with any team (this includes parents who are not coaches/mentors)
5. Rest of team members (no laptops, printers, file boxes etc consuming extra seats -- no seat saving allowed !
6. 'Traditional scouts' and team 'storage' location. These folks can spread out in the remaining seats and stake out a spot and save seats and use extra seats for equipment, coats, bags, etc, with at least one or more team members remaining present to keep an eye on stuff. In some venues, depending upon seat count and public presence, this might be 'end-zone' seats.

FIRST is about engineering, engineering is about efficient use of resources and making trade-offs. It makes no sense for each of dozens of teams having 6 or more scouts all counting the same game pieces being scored. If each bot is watched by 4 to 6 crowd-scouts (36 seats!), you'll have a very accurate data collection.

The goal of providing an excellent viewing experience for the public (both in terms of view quality and comfort in not struggling to find 'unsaved' seats), far, far outweighs the goal of providing six or more premium seats per team for scouting.

Plus, won't the public be more impressed when it is explained to them that the crowd-scouting section has teams working together for the benefit of all?

Each team could be given one button (like a driver button) that is an informal ambassador button, which is intended to be used to sit in the public section and welcome visitors and explain the game/FIRST to them.