[FRC Blog] We're Listening

[MrRoboSteve]

Originally Posted by EricH

You also are putting words in my mouth, and you are making a seriously flawed assumption to boot. I'm not expressing disbelief, I'm saying that they apparently didn't consider that particular effect of their decision. And when you look just at the team I'm affiliated with, you ignore the team(S) in my signature. If you can honestly tell me that you've never heard of at least one, you got another think comin'.

FIRST could easily have considered that effect of the decision without consulting you or the mentors you know.

The team I mentor went to Champs once, four years ago, early in my involvement in the program. My known universe of teams is those that are at regionals I attend -- teams like 525, who selected us in 2012, and 2826, who are routinely in the top ranks. I'm sorry if it's insulting to you, but I have no knowledge of any of the teams listed in your signature. I see they're quite successful. But, if I hopped in the time travel machine, moved backwards a couple weeks to the last regional I was at, and asked random mentors in the pits about those three teams, it would be interesting to see who would be aware of them.

Based on the history of those teams you've been affiliated with, it's likely that you're well connected in the "mentor of successful team" community. Note that I've never disputed your points about mentor response to the change.

I hope you can accept that your experience in FRC is both meaningful and unrepresentative of teams as a whole. One goal I have in in participating in this thread and its siblings is not to impose my point of view on others -- in fact, if you look through my posts, you'll find little to identify what my actual opinion is about this change. That is intentional.

Another goal I have is to get posters to think about their assumptions, to separate fact from opinion, to get them to think about the problem from the point of view of someone in a different situation. Only then will they have a sense of the tradeoffs that FIRST HQ is trying to make.

There's also a learning opportunity here for team members (and mentors) about how to deal with change, and how to advocate for change with decisionmakers in an organizational context like FIRST. No matter whether you participate in a FIRST program, go to one of the competing programs, or decide to create your own, any moderately successful program will soon have a set of decisionmakers, independent of teams, who are charged with balancing tradeoffs to make the program a success. The decisionmakers need to balance the needs of participants, volunteers, sponsors, and others. You might think that they are unconstrained in their decisionmaking choices, but I think you'd be surprised at how constrained their options really are, given their organizational mission, the resources they have available, and the multiple constituencies they work to satisfy.

Compare pages 4-5 of the FIRST Annual Report to page 5 of the BEST Annual Report. There's a reason why both programs measure their success along the same lines -- number of teams and number of volunteers. FIRST (or BEST, or the VEX competitions) are ecosystems, and you need the right combination of resources to make them successful. The organizations work both to optimize the set of resources, and define what success looks like to them. Think about the relative success of FTC since it started, and the discussion that must cause at BEST about whether their free-to-teams tactic is the right choice going forward.

I'm also trying to convince people to tone down the hyperbolic rhetoric, and focus instead on making the best of the situation. Something made FIRST think that splitting Champs was the best choice for those years. I can't believe that they made the decision stupidly, or uncaringly, or lightly, without considering the tradeoffs.

Originally Posted by EricH

It would, however, mean that I would reach out to those mentors either before or immediately following with a very detailed reasoning why the change was being made, and why it was being made in the way that it was. There's a difference between that and the method HQ used... It would also mean that I would be taking that change very seriously, not lightly. I would be making sure that I had as much information as I could before making the decision.

They announced the decision two weeks before the largest annual F2F gathering in the FIRST calendar. They have positioned the announcement so that they can hear directly from people immediately afterward. I heard on another thread that they were at the FiM District champs last weekend, and there's no lack of long-time teams there from which to get feedback in person. If they wanted to bury this, they picked pretty much the worst time of year to do so.

Originally Posted by EricH

It would also mean that I would be taking that change very seriously, not lightly.

A final goal I have in these threads is to get people to speak precisely about what they mean, and that's why I'm asking clarifying questions about your statements. Does your statement above mean that you think FIRST is not taking the change seriously?