Future First Championship News

[gblake]

Folks,

I have a question. What do the many people posting in this thread want to accomplish?

Venting or registering your opinion is interesting, but ... I haven't seen many people write that they plan to do A at B (or tell A to B) in order to accomplish C.

If you want to affect the plans for 2016 (doubtful), the plans for 2017 (maybe), or the plans for 2018 (decent chance), I recommend finding the person or place that accepts inputs/votes/advice from folks like you, and uses those to influence what will happen in 2016/2017/2018.

I suspect that getting virtually bent out of shape (or not) here in a CD thread is not the most effective way to exert your influence. It can be interesting, it can be fun, it can be an outlet, but ... I don't think it is the most effective way to influence FIRST's plans.

I suggest mulling things over for a while, and then investing some time in a method that will be (more) effective.

Blake

[bduddy]

Originally Posted by gblake

Folks,

I have a question. What do the many people posting in this thread want to accomplish?

Venting or registering your opinion is interesting, but ... I haven't seen many people write that they plan to do A at B (or tell A to B) in order to accomplish C.

If you want to affect the plans for 2016 (doubtful), the plans for 2017 (maybe), or the plans for 2018 (decent chance), I recommend finding the person or place that accepts inputs/votes/advice from folks like you, and uses those to influence what will happen in 2016/2017/2018.

I suspect that getting virtually bent out of shape (or not) here in a CD thread is not the most effective way to exert your influence. It can be interesting, it can be fun, it can be an outlet, but ... I don't think it is the most effective way to influence FIRST's plans.

I suggest mulling things over for a while, and then investing some time in a method that will be (more) effective.

Blake

Well, this is a discussion forum, so I'm not entirely sure what else you expect to happen here.

I recommend finding the person or place that accepts inputs/votes/advice from folks like you, and uses those to influence what will happen in 2016/2017/2018.

There isn't one.

[Rachel Lim]

Originally Posted by gblake

If you want to affect the plans for 2016 (doubtful), the plans for 2017 (maybe), or the plans for 2018 (decent chance), I recommend finding the person or place that accepts inputs/votes/advice from folks like you, and uses those to influence what will happen in 2016/2017/2018.

That's what we're doing. See http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...Were-Listening--FIRST does listen to CD. I do agree that this thread grew very quickly (and perhaps got a bit out of hand), but the fact that everyone feels so passionately about this subject made FIRST take a look.

Originally Posted by bduddy

There isn't one.

There's CD. It's not official, but it does work. I doubt the answer to Q461 would have been changed otherwise, and the same for the follow up blog post about the split champs.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Rachel Lim

...
That's what we're doing. See http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...Were-Listening--FIRST does listen to CD. I do agree that this thread grew very quickly (and perhaps got a bit out of hand), but the fact that everyone feels so passionately about this subject made FIRST take a look.

...

There's CD. It's not official, but it does work. I doubt the answer to Q461 would have been changed otherwise, and the same for the follow up blog post about the split champs.

Trust me, for exerting the sort of influence most folks writing here appear to want to exert, there are better avenues than CD. Finding them (it's not that hard), and learning how to use them, is an exercise left up to the reader.

For those authors who simply want to do some discussing of this particular done-deal. This is a great place to do that.

Blake
PS: CD is also a great place to do many other things - I love it; and I hold its owners/admins in very high regard.

[Mr. Tatorscout]

So I mentioned to a rookie parent that they were splitting champs to Houston and Detroit. He's not from this country and the first thing out of his mouth was "Why wouldn't they do east coast/west coast?"

Really, Houston and Detroit? Last I looked, the US is longer than it is tall. Pretty simple geometry proof can be inferred here.

[pntbll1313]

Originally Posted by Mr. Tatorscout

So I mentioned to a rookie parent that they were splitting champs to Houston and Detroit. He's not from this country and the first thing out of his mouth was "Why wouldn't they do east coast/west coast?"

Really, Houston and Detroit? Last I looked, the US is longer than it is tall. Pretty simple geometry proof can be inferred here.

I'm not sure it's that simple. You can't look at the US in terms of land. I think you need to look at it based on team density. If you were to split the US down the middle I would say that the number of teams in the Eastern half of the US is over 80%. (that map is from 2013, so maybe it's different now?)

If anyone has a lot of time on their hands, or knows a way to do it quickly, I would be interested to hear the best 2 cities to minimize driving distance for the majority of teams so that it could be split into two equally populated Super Regionals. I don't know where to draw the line, but I would say Everyone from Illinois over would be considered a "West" team. Maybe East/West is the best way, but I haven't heard anyone actually give a better suggestion when they are complaining that North/South is wrong.
(For the record Detroit is maybe a 10.5 hour bus instead of a 9 hour bus for my team, and neither is as warm and as I'd like)

[JoeXIII'007]

Writer's block on a presentation I'm giving at a conference in late May shifted my attention to this ripple in the FIRST universe which was throwing off strong enough of a signal for me to log in to CD for the first time in years and pitch in some commentary.

I haven't been too terribly involved in FIRST since 2012 when 66 and 470 we're still separated by school district. I pondered volunteering this year, but didn't get past getting an account on VIMS. Before 2012, my years of heavy involvement in FIRST were between 2002 and 2008, my wonderful teenaged life.

So about this shift in championship event scheduling and locating. First of all: yay Detroit! There's a lot to be excited about that city, and this only adds to it.

Second, some questions for you all:

1. Are you networking within and outside of your teams?
2. Are you critically analyzing (AKA: studying) what makes a great team and vice versa?
3. Do you have a working strategy on 1 and an evolving conclusion on 2?

If you're good on these three, relax. Changes in competition structure aren't going to do squat against your bulletproof strategy that works not only in FIRST but also life overall.

We have the internet, so if there are now a couple of Championship events, study the best of the best at your assigned event, and compare with the others you can find online. Thought experiments are fun and a great exercise. It may not compare too terribly to actually being there, but it's certainly better than expending $$$ and limited resources that doing so would require.

Now, given most of you are going to/will be going to university or college (I went to community college before university FWIW), let me rewrite that 3 part strategy in the form of questions:

1. Are you networking within and outside of your College/University, ensuring your network is a diverse set? Scholarships and interships/post-graduation work are hard to get, but your chances will increase greatly if you do this.
2. Are you studying hard, and focusing on what makes a response/answer to things/questions of academic/scientific merit valid (not necessarily 'correct', though it is a goal to aim for)?
3. Do you have a working strategy on 1 and an evolving conclusion on 2?

I believe if you ask yourself these 3 things, as simplistic of a model as it is, you're not going to be in bad shape. Study hard and smart, treat it like you would any job (some of you probably have a word about this, but I'm making a good faith assumption here), and be sure to have some fun in college/university, it helps.

Additionally, forms of these three questions are good to continually ask yourself in the workforce, which given I've been in it for 3 years now, I can safely say is quite a frenzy. No real 'winners' out here, just the occasional flash of success which we celebrate after work every time they occur.

Which leads me to my final point:

TL;DR - The commentary here in this thread is great, but our prince/princess is in another castle, or more directly our championship event(s) is(are) on a different field.

My gut feeling is that this will be a more sustainable strategy going forward, given the way competition structures and necessary logistics have evolved over the time I've known FIRST.

That's about it from me. Good luck out there!

[mburd]

Originally Posted by Mr. Tatorscout

So I mentioned to a rookie parent that they were splitting champs to Houston and Detroit. He's not from this country and the first thing out of his mouth was "Why wouldn't they do east coast/west coast?"

Really, Houston and Detroit? Last I looked, the US is longer than it is tall. Pretty simple geometry proof can be inferred here.

My guess is that the two cities have been trying to get the championship for a while and figured they had a good chance being centrally located. More eastern and western cities didn't think they had a chance because of their location. When FIRST started brainstorming cities, Detroit and Houston came up because they had probably already made a decent offer assuming that they had a good chance of getting it. Meanwhile cities in the east and west didn't know it would be split, so they didn't bother trying to bring it to them.