Petition to start things that inform, inspire, educate and de-confuse the public

[GeeTwo]

Individually, I have done things in this vein; I'm not sure how much they can be implemented as a team, but I'm going to try.

First of all, most of the people in the situation described will show up on Saturday, so that is the day to make the big push on this front. In the case of teams attending local districts/regionals, this means that much of this responsibility will fall on the "junior varsity", that is, the team members who cannot get off of school on (Thursday or) Friday, but come to competition on Saturday.

The bottom line is to encourage team members to "Welcome, Teach, and Serve". That is, if you see someone in the area who is not obvioiusly part of a team, Welcome them to FRC and the xxxxx regional/district event. Share a bit about yourself, and learn what brings them to the event. Teach them what this year's game is, and at least the basics of how it's scored. Try to describe the main strategies. Serve is very general, and may range from the trivial to the extravagant; it could be as simple as directions to the bath facilities, or as detailed as providing directions to finding local teams on usfirst.org.

At Bayou, I spent most of Saturday down in the "tunnel" between the grandstand seats, ready to pop forward to the curtain to shoot video. I met a number of people who just sort of "wandered in off the street", and a few who had team shirts, but had no idea what this year's game, or a least scoring, was like. I got pretty good at quickly identifying the main scoring activities. I also directed several to the usfirst "find a team" page and in at least one case, told them who the closest team to their location was.