Preparing for the Town Hall Meeting on the New Championships Format

[MrRoboSteve]

Originally Posted by Rachel Lim

I agree that finding volunteers is an issue FIRST has, but I'm slightly confused as to how having two "split" events requires more volunteers than two "mixed" events. If anything, this will allow volunteers who only can/want to help with one event focus on purely that (e.g. if you want to volunteer with FLL, now you don't have to pick one)

My post about volunteers might have been a bit confusing. I'll try to explain further. First, I think you'd agree that FRC events are much more volunteer intensive than FTC and FLL events. Therefore, I am going to focus on FRC in this discussion.

At each FRC regional event, there are several sources of volunteers. I'll walk you through my mental map of each source.

The first group are the key volunteers. These volunteers are usually very experienced, trained, and usually return from year-to-year. They are often alumni (either team members or mentors) who continue their participation because they enjoy it. These volunteers are dedicated enough that they will often travel, on their own $$, to a regional to participate.

The second group of volunteers at regionals are team-provided volunteers -- both team members and family. The supply of these volunteers is roughly proportional to the number of team members present at a regional, adjusted based on the number of teams that have to travel to attend.

The third group of volunteers is community volunteers. A good example of this in 2015 was at North Star -- we had a large group of hard-working volunteers from Target headquarters who helped at the event. When selection a location for an event, the availability of these volunteers is a key factor.

In sheer numbers, most of the volunteers are sourced from teams and the community.

At a Champs-style event, you have a couple issues.

First is that there are a bunch of volunteer positions that you need to fill that aren't needed at a regional, increasing demand for volunteers.

The second issue is around team-provided volunteers. Fewer team-provided volunteers are available at Champs, because the total number of people from a team attending Champs (including parents) is lower. It is also possible for team volunteers and alumni to fit a shift or two between work and/or classes at a regional. A good example of this is Robot Inspectors -- the LRI will happily accept you as a robot inspector if you are competent and can help only between noon and 6pm on Thursday at a regional event. In order to compensate for this, more community volunteers are needed at Champs.

So you need more community volunteers to run your Champs-style event. What's the problem with that? For a variety of reasons (age, incomes, culture), each community has a limited supply of community volunteers. Wondering why Minnesota can operate two well-run double regionals? Being #1 in volunteering rate, with 900,000 active volunteers in the area has a lot to do with it. St. Louis is no slouch either, with 600,000 active volunteers. But there's probably a limit to how many of those volunteers you can attract to help your event. I know our Volunteer Coordinator in Minnesota has to work hard to staff the events here.

So coming back to your question, my concern is around the supply of community volunteers available to support a Champs-style event. Hosting these events in two different locations helps address that by allowing you to draw from two different pools of community volunteers.

Originally Posted by Rachel Lim

- How are these teams currently doing it? Do they have a lot of overlap between the programs or have separate groups of kids/mentors?

Some students participate as team members in FTC and FRC (ours, for example), in others the FTC and FLL teams are mentored by FRC team members. There are a lot of Chairman's Award applications that discuss how the FRC team created/mentored multiple FTC/FLL teams.

Originally Posted by Rachel Lim

I think that's part of the issue. FIRST hasn't explained their goals. Even Frank's follow up blog post, as good at it was, didn't explain why they think a split champs is necessary. Maybe they have a reason that it is necessary and there aren't any other alternatives, but maybe there aren't. Unless they tell us, we won't know why they decided to go forward with this.

I disagree that they haven't been clear about their goals. The announcement has two goal statements in it that they use to justify the change.

We want more kids to feel the passion and power that comes with being a part of FIRST Championship events.

we seek to reduce the travel distances and associated travel expenses for a significant number of our teams.

They have decided that they're willing to compromise on "single experience" in order to offer "more teams."

If you read FIRST's mission statement,

Mission

Our mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.

you have to admit that this decision optimizes for more young people having an inspiring experience. Reasonable people might disagree on the tradeoff, but it is tough to see how the change runs counter to the mission of FIRST.