Town Hall Meeting Video

[IKE]

I think things might have gone moderately better had the FIRST Panel accepted some of the peoples statements and acknowledged that they are entitled to their feelings. Many of the responses were inadvertently telling people that "I don't think your feelings are right, and here is why". I made this same mistake in a discussion after the town hall.

I was very worried by some of the comments that I heard coming from very respected mentors. I was also fired up due to people quoting things that I did not think were true (growth in Michigan factors) or personally know are not true (no safe places within 20 miles of Detroit). I went to have a discussion with one such mentor whose comments had me very concerned. The discussion quickly turned into both of us talking at each other vs. talking to/with each other. The discussion stayed a discussion though a bit adversarial when this persons team all stepped in to back this person up.

In retrospect, I was trying to convince that team that what they felt was not reality when in fact it is their reality. Their feelings are real to them, and needed to be acknowledged. I may not share their feelings, but trying to "fix" or "change" their feelings at that time was not going to happen and just validated that I was not in touch with their reality. To that mentor and team, sorry for having that conversation. I am sure I came off very condescending to you and your team trying to tell you how to improve your program. I may not have agreed with your feelings, but I should not have tried to change them.

I think the FIRST panel had the same problem. In several instances, they tried to "dismiss" or "correct" a persons feelings, when a higher level of empathy would have gone a long way.

For instance, with regards to concern about Detroit:

We hear your concern about safety of your students in an Area like Detroit. I know that for many mentors, these kids mean as much to you as your own kids. We had very similar concerns and did a lot of cite visits before making the decision. We know that doesn't increase your comfort, and as a mentor you will likely have an uphill battle with a lot of your parents, so we would like to work with teams to help mitigate the concerns that teams might have, and support their efforts in ensuring that teams can attend the Championship in Detroit. St. Louis has a very similar reputation (#2 to #4 depending on the list), and we did have instances where we had to work with teams to understand the safety that we ensure when hosting an event. You can see some of these measures if you look for the extra police officers that have been brought in along corridors of public transportation to and from the venues. We work hard with the cities to ensure that teams will have the safest and best experience we can give them. Let us know what sort of efforts we should make public in order to better support the difficult decision you will have to make, and the difficult discussions you will have to have when planning travel with parents.

This basically says the same thing they covered, but I think it would have gone over better.

With regards to the "students want a champion", had they said:

We agree with you that it is important that students and teams have role models, and often those role models are pointed out to them via the winning and champion alliance. Inspiration is one of the most important factors of FIRST, and we share your concern about the possible concern of 2 Champions vs. 1. Because of this, we have been and will continue to investigate possible alternatives and scenarios of a follow on event to have 1Champion Alliance. FIRST dealt with a similar concern when switching from single team to Alliances. There was a lot of consternation and people upset about no longer having truly 1 true champion. FIRST got another round of this when switching from 2 to 3 alliance members and the discussions still come up about the serpentine draft.
This does not mean that we are disregarding these concerns or that your concerns are ill placed. Having "a" champion is very important. We are just valuing having more participants in a Championship event as higher value than having a singular winner at that event. To show though that we do believe it has important value, we are investigated possiblilities and alternatives to get to a single alliance champion for FIRST.
It should be noted that for most High School sports, they stop at a State Champion, and thus there are at least 50 champions in the US alone. For many of the more popular High School Sports, you have different divisions or classes within a given state, and thus as many as 5 State champions for the same sport. When talking with a 2A Football State Champion, their title is no less meaningful than the title awarded to a 3A Football State Champion, though the debate often occurs when a single class sport (like Inidiana basketball) transitions from 1 class to multiple classes.
FIRST is not just a High School Sport, and we like being different. Again, this is why we are investigating ways to get to a single Champion.

With regards to "Divorce" and splitting up the family, had they said:

I really like the family analogy. In many ways, the FIRST Championship has been one of the wildest, craziest, and most fun family re-unions that anyone can imagine. If we can go back to the graphic, I think we can explain a lot better about how this family reunion has changed over the years. Early on, the family was small. Infact with only 30 some members, we could pretty much fit everybody anywhere. Over the years, we grew and grew. Very soon, it was too big to have just 1 event, so we created regionals, but still had a Championship where the whole family could get together. This model worked for quite a while even though the family grew at a crazy fast pace. We were always able to adjust the format of the re-union to accommodate those that wanted to come up until the late 2000s. By that time, FIRST had gotten big enough that it was getting very difficult to accomodate all who wanted and could afford to attend. We have since tried a lot of different ways to fit the family. Its really hard to find a place that can fit all the cousins, and second cousins, and .... this year we even went to a completely different format than the past, and it has frankly been a bit crazy. We will do it again like this next year, hopefully with some lessons learned from this year after we review how the event went, but we cannot find a way to make it work in a single venue. As we said before, we have reviewed options and did not find any ideal options, but we went with what we believe to be the best of those options.
While we don't look at it as a divorce, I can see why it does feel like splitting up of children. We are still considering and working through the methods of who will attend which event, and how those will be decided, but ultimately some friends that are very far apart will be seperated.
When Michigan anounced the districts, this was a common complaint at that time, and is still one of the chief gripes that comes from the district model. I will say though that from what I understand, old friends keep up the freindships that they want to work for, and many new stronger relationships have been formed by teams that are able to visit more frequently in those regions.
We at FIRST HQ do not honestly know everything that you mentors and teams do for us as there is so much done that goes un-recognized. Because of that, we will never be able to thank you enough. It is really heart wrenching to see any action we do cause so much pain as you and many others are experiencing. I love hearing that you talk to the teams that are your heroes. Before you leave this weekend, please talk to about 10 teams that it is their first time coming. Ask them about their experience and what they will be taking home. We know what we are doing is not popular among many of our greatest teams, but if you talk to a lot of those "almost didn't make it" teams, you will likely understand why we are doing what we are doing. This year Don Bossi went to 3 events every weekend and talked to as many teams as he could. Talking with all of those teams, I think we are making the tough, but right decision. With your support and help in the areas that we have some flexibility, I think we can make the 2 event format great, but I do know that some of you that will get to attend those events will miss seeing some of your friends. *I personally am glad to see that we no longer have our event the same weekend as the VEX World Championship so I can see some of our friends from IFI here at the event.

*I added this last statement for me as well as a few others that would love to hear that more frequently....

[Garret]

Concerning the safety issues about Detroit... St. Louis is second in the country when it comes to crime... And Atlanta is also in the top 6 at least.
FIRST has had championships in some "dangerous" places, and I haven't heard very many reports from teams about how bad the cities were.

Thought this was slightly relevant, but at our Super Regional in Oakland, CA, our FTC team got to witness a homeless man pull a knife and start threatening people right outside the restaurant where we were at. Additionally right across the street from where this was going on there was another FTC team waiting to get into another restaurant. This all occured about 100-150ft outside of the hotel/venue where the tournament was at.

For some of our team members that was a very traumatic experience that turned that "championship" experience into a rather negative one as opposed to positive.

This experience has me very concerned about FIRST moving champs to a city that is supposed to be more dangerous that Oakland. The fact that just because they personally haven't experienced anything there is one of the lamest excuses I have ever heard (my personal opinion).

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Garret

This experience has me very concerned about FIRST moving champs to a city that is supposed to be more dangerous that Oakland. The fact that just because they personally haven't experienced anything there is one of the lamest excuses I have ever heard (my personal opinion).

As it has been mentioned before when hosting an event with 400+ FRC teams plus jrFLL, FLL, & FTC the list of possible venues and host cities start decreasing fast. Crime is common in cities. FIRST isn't intentionally booking venues in higher crime areas because they want to its because its the only places available that have the venue, hotel, food, airport, and public transportation available for teams to use. Start taking out these factors and the ability for FIRST to host the event and teams to attend becomes an issue.

Hopefully FIRST will step up and increase security more for our remaining time in St. Louis considering all of the reports of theft and nearby incidents and revisit the topic when we move to new cities. Detroit does have a bad reputation but if our friends from Michigan don't necessarily see it the same way let's take their word for it instead of jumping to conclusions. I don't see how the badge system helped this other than creating a headache for teams and more importantly spectators.

After watching the video I have a lot of concerns over how FIRST is handling the situation. I won't agree that many of the spectators in the room were as respectful as they could have been however FIRST did not handle this announcement or decision in a manner the community deserved. If they wanted a more positive outcome or reaction from the community they did a good job of encouraging the outcome they received. Even just having a moderator set the wrong tone with the attendees especially when he made the comment about remaining GP. I am concerned with the direction FIRST is moving in with regard to who is running the program and their involvement (or lack thereof) in FIRST programs and would disagree that just because you spoke to teams at XYZ events this year doesn't get you in touch with how the community feels with regard to where FIRST is going. I wouldn't hesitate to say that if the announcement were made before the competition season started the reactions from teams would have been very different.

As someone who has been a student & mentor in FLL and FRC I'm very puzzled as to why FRC needs to push for 25% championship representation whereas FLL is drastically underrepresented. It seemed the answer for FLL was to cut back on who qualified using a lottery system for State Championship while the answer for FRC is to just keep making the Championship bigger or in this case add a second.

This is disappointing to see not only the community potentially getting split but that the competition getting split. I think the beauty of FRC has been the balance between inspiration through a competition but now it looks clear that FIRST doesn't see it that way and would rather continue to hold on the current qualifications instead of having a true Championship.

I hope that FIRST will consider having a World Festival and a World Championship allowing more teams to move on to a higher level of play while still being able to crown a true World Champion.

Of course we can all hope for FIRST to push stronger in the next two years to bring more and more into the world of districts so a more even qualifying system is put in place to advance teams the right way. I'm sure many teams would agree their District Championships were more competitive than their divisions.

[IKE]

As a follow on to my lengthy post about "empathy", I thought that this post I saw on Ian Curtis's FB page was a great article to share:
The Engineer's Lament
by Malcolm Gladwell (author of several amazing books).

In the article, he tells a famous engineering joke about a Preist, a Doctor, and an Engineer playing golf. They are held up by a group of golfers clearly struggling. They ask the range manager what is going on, and the manager explains they are a group of firefighters that were blinded fighting a fire not too long ago. The Preist says he will say a prayer for the firefighters. They Doctor says he will call up an optimologist friend to see if there is something she could do. The Engineer asks: "Why can't they play at night?"

In the article, it talks in part about some of the biggest recalls in auto history and how they were handled and mis-handled.

While we may find the best compromise of a given solution set, sometimes the lack of compassion or empathy can come across as out of touch. As many communication experts will tell you, it is often less about what you say, and more about how you say it.

[Dan Petrovic]

While the town hall wasn't what I expected and while I don't think it was super productive, what's done is done and we need to move on.

One particular topic I'm interested in is the concept of allowing a few teams to choose which championship to go to. Which teams get to choose and how many? Will it be a lottery? Will it be by how you qualified (ie Chairman's award finalists, HoF, Legacy, and Rookie All-Star)?

Also, I have a feeling that Houston will be the more attractive option (warmer weather, less murdery than Detroit, likely attendance of 254 ), so how will they balance that?

[AndrewPospeshil]

Thanks to 1640 for the video!

I'm glad that this meeting happened - it shows that FIRST is open to input from teams. The meeting seemed relatively unproductive - expected. Emotions are high, and the kind of people who would miss part of the day to attend are probably the more passionate ones about the issues at hand. A few (very, very rambling) thoughts:

• The whole concern with Detroit as a venue is understandable but imo an overreaction. FIRST would not send thousands upon thousands of kids to a city if they believed it would be unsafe. Not to mention the city is demoing and rebuilding a huge portion of the area between downtown and midtown in the coming years, so I have confidence the city will not be as horrible as some seem to think it will be. If STL was good enough for FIRST's standards (which it had to be, evidently), then Detroit should be too.
• The "0 alumni on the FIRST board" statement was pretty jarring to read/hear but I guess it makes sense. Let's figure someone has to be around, oh 30 years old to have the business experience required to be on the first board (just a rough estimate from a high schooler who doesn't know what he's talking about). That means that they would've competed from roughly 2000-2003. FIRST was a vastly different place back then. Even if they had wanted to hire young alumni onto their board, they would not be as reflective of today's FIRST community as alumni who have competed much more recently.
• I think the main thing that a lot of people are still forgetting is that not every team has the same goal. Some just want to build a robot, compete at a regional (or 2 districts), and go home then learn from their experiences. Some teams want to win Einstein. There's nothing wrong with either. But FIRST is faced with an interesting dilemma: who do they lean towards? It's become obvious that they can't really cater to both kinds of teams - the program is just way too large. So do they create a model that helps mid- to low-level teams get a taste of the CMP experience? Or do they create a more exclusionary but ultimately more exciting model that pushes veteran powerhouses farther? This model also has the benefit of being more exciting for outsiders, but is less sustainable.
• Which brings me to my next thought: team sustainability. After the 2CMP announcement, many veteran teams, members, and mentors were outraged. Some claimed that they would just leave FIRST as they saw that the program was just no longer desirable to them. However, the much less often heard story is the rookie teams who don't have the resources or more importantly the drive to continue for subsequent years. They didn't advance to any level of competition above the minimum, so a lot of people would just give up. Now there are rookie teams who would use this only as motivation to get better and make DCMP or CMP, but I couldn't tell you how many rookies fall into either category. FIRST kind of needs to decide which group they think is more advantageous to aid - the established veterans, who are the cornerstones of their communities, role models for rookies, and even mentors? Or do they support rookie teams looking for just a taste of victory, who might never win Einstein but just want to travel outside their state and see robots from all across the world?

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Garret

Thought this was slightly relevant, but at our Super Regional in Oakland, CA, our FTC team got to witness a homeless man pull a knife and start threatening people right outside the restaurant where we were at. Additionally right across the street from where this was going on there was another FTC team waiting to get into another restaurant. This all occured about 100-150ft outside of the hotel/venue where the tournament was at.

For some of our team members that was a very traumatic experience that turned that "championship" experience into a rather negative one as opposed to positive.

This experience has me very concerned about FIRST moving champs to a city that is supposed to be more dangerous that Oakland. The fact that just because they personally haven't experienced anything there is one of the lamest excuses I have ever heard (my personal opinion).

I understand your concern. In recent years however, Detroit has hosted numerous MLB playoff games, NFL games, NHL playoff games, a Superbowl, an MLB allstar game, the world's most attended autoshow (yearly), a yearly Thanksgiving Day Parade, NCAA Basketball, Hockey, and Football bowl games.

Numbers can be scary things - especially since the news likes to ignore them. Claiming Detroit is the worst in the country is far more attention grabbing than saying "Detroit has 45 murders per 100,000 people, while New Orleans has 41, Newark has 40, St. Louis has 37, and Baltimore has 37." A whopping difference of .008%.

If you get into comparitive statistics between other things that might kill you, it gets even less scary. If you've been to St. Louis, you've been to Detroit.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by AndrewPospeshil

Thanks to 1640 for the video!

I'm glad that this meeting happened - it shows that FIRST is open to input from teams. The meeting seemed relatively unproductive - expected. Emotions are high, and the kind of people who would miss part of the day to attend are probably the more passionate ones about the issues at hand. A few (very, very rambling) thoughts:

• The whole concern with Detroit as a venue is understandable but imo an overreaction. FIRST would not send thousands upon thousands of kids to a city if they believed it would be unsafe. Not to mention the city is demoing and rebuilding a huge portion of the area between downtown and midtown in the coming years, so I have confidence the city will not be as horrible as some seem to think it will be. If STL was good enough for FIRST's standards (which it had to be, evidently), then Detroit should be too.
• The "0 alumni on the FIRST board" statement was pretty jarring to read/hear but I guess it makes sense. Let's figure someone has to be around, oh 30 years old to have the business experience required to be on the first board (just a rough estimate from a high schooler who doesn't know what he's talking about). That means that they would've competed from roughly 2000-2003. FIRST was a vastly different place back then. Even if they had wanted to hire young alumni onto their board, they would not be as reflective of today's FIRST community as alumni who have competed much more recently.
• I think the main thing that a lot of people are still forgetting is that not every team has the same goal. Some just want to build a robot, compete at a regional (or 2 districts), and go home then learn from their experiences. Some teams want to win Einstein. There's nothing wrong with either. But FIRST is faced with an interesting dilemma: who do they lean towards? It's become obvious that they can't really cater to both kinds of teams - the program is just way too large. So do they create a model that helps mid- to low-level teams get a taste of the CMP experience? Or do they create a more exclusionary but ultimately more exciting model that pushes veteran powerhouses farther? This model also has the benefit of being more exciting for outsiders, but is less sustainable.
• Which brings me to my next thought: team sustainability. After the 2CMP announcement, many veteran teams, members, and mentors were outraged. Some claimed that they would just leave FIRST as they saw that the program was just no longer desirable to them. However, the much less often heard story is the rookie teams who don't have the resources or more importantly the drive to continue for subsequent years. They didn't advance to any level of competition above the minimum, so a lot of people would just give up. Now there are rookie teams who would use this only as motivation to get better and make DCMP or CMP, but I couldn't tell you how many rookies fall into either category. FIRST kind of needs to decide which group they think is more advantageous to aid - the established veterans, who are the cornerstones of their communities, role models for rookies, and even mentors? Or do they support rookie teams looking for just a taste of victory, who might never win Einstein but just want to travel outside their state and see robots from all across the world?

I wonder at exactly what level this decision was made. Did it really go to the executive board? Or was it made at a level a little more tuned-in to FIRST teams?

[EricDrost]

Originally Posted by AndrewPospeshil

So do they create a model that helps mid- to low-level teams get a taste of the CMP experience? Or do they create a more exclusionary but ultimately more exciting model that pushes veteran powerhouses farther? This model also has the benefit of being more exciting for outsiders, but is less sustainable.

Do you have any evidence of this? FiM seems to have a lot of success with the second model. More than the "qualify regional winners and waitlist lottery the rest" model does.

[dag0620]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

I wonder at exactly what level this decision was made. Did it really go to the executive board? Or was it made at a level a little more tuned-in to FIRST teams?

I'm sure a decision of this size, impact, and scope most likely made it to the level of The Board of Directors. If on the off chance it didn't go that high, the call was certainly made at the level of the President of FIRST.

[David Lame]

Originally Posted by dag0620

I'm sure a decision of this size, impact, and scope most likely made it to the level of The Board of Directors. If on the off chance it didn't go that high, the call was certainly made at the level of the President of FIRST.

I'm certain that it went up that high.

The real question is how far down did it go? Did they float this idea to anyone on actual teams?

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by David Lame

I'm certain that it went up that high.

The real question is how far down did it go? Did they float this idea to anyone on actual teams?

It's become pretty clear that they didn't.

Even with Don's defense of 'We can't poll several thousand people about this' (except that you can, and did after the fact) ... FIRST has quite a few 'focus groups' to draw opinions from. WFA's, the Hall of Fame... These are groups and individuals with a good read on the pulse of the FIRST community. Asking them would have made it pretty easy to figure out how the broader group would feel about something before signing a contract.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Libby K

It's become pretty clear that they didn't.

Even with Don's defense of 'We can't poll several thousand people about this' (except that you can, and did after the fact) ... FIRST has quite a few 'focus groups' to draw opinions from. WFA's, the Hall of Fame... These are groups and individuals with a good read on the pulse of the FIRST community. Asking them would have made it pretty easy to figure out how the broader group would feel about something before signing a contract.

Not to mention that (and this is something that I now regret not asking at the town hall meeting) nothing seemed to prevent FIRST from saying, "We are looking into holding two geographically-locked championship events; thoughts?". That's the real kicker for me. We knew when FIRST renewed their contract with STL a few years that they were looking at other cities (IIRC the list was STL, Indianapolis, and Orlando; someone can correct me if I'm wrong on this but I remember a blog post from Frank on it), so what stopped them from proposing the idea of two championships to the community? Then proposals like the World Festival/World Championship could have come up earlier and be addressed during the town hall*.

*That's the one major thing I gathered from the meeting, and the major point that angered me. The meeting clearly showed that FIRST has absolutely zero indication of even considering community input in doing anything other than two geographically locked championships.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Steven Donow

Not to mention that (and this is something that I now regret not asking at the town hall meeting) nothing seemed to prevent FIRST from saying, "We are looking into holding two geographically-locked championship events; thoughts?". That's the real kicker for me. We knew when FIRST renewed their contract with STL a few years that they were looking at other cities (IIRC the list was STL, Indianapolis, and Orlando; someone can correct me if I'm wrong on this but I remember a blog post from Frank on it), so what stopped them from proposing the idea of two championships to the community? Then proposals like the World Festival/World Championship could have come up earlier and be addressed during the town hall*.

*That's the one major thing I gathered from the meeting, and the major point that angered me. The meeting clearly showed that FIRST has absolutely zero indication of even considering community input in doing anything other than two geographically locked championships.

I think its safe to say they knew the reaction from FRC participants and figured it was easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. Any attempt to gather feedback from teams and the community at this stage is a bad attempt to make things right. Best case scenario they consider options into making a World Festival and a World Championship however in my opinion FIRST is trying to steer away from the competitive side of robots so they don't lose the culture they want to see. Worst case they continue forward and they employ the strategy of if you don't like it quit because what you want isn't what we are about. Sadly I feel like this is where they are headed.

I think its in poor taste to keep calling it a championship(s) and instead we need to call them a World Festival. If I were an executive showing up in Houston or Detroit to see the championship I'd be concerned for the rest of FRC if I was seeing some of the teams on the field that I am. I feel like I'm one of the few who can say that considering I competed with one of those robots that shouldn't have been there. Its really sad for teams in districts because we know our DCMPs have a better field of competitors than our divisions and splitting the pool into 8 divisions this year made for some shallow divisions.

FIRST needs to stop using the waitlist at the Championship. Even if more district systems overtake regionals they will still fill all of these vacant slots with waitlisted teams. I'm curious if waitlisted teams this year kept late qualifying teams from attending the championship because finding transportation and hotel was impossible while the waitlisted teams were able to book early.

[wilsonmw04]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

Its really sad for teams in districts because we know our DCMPs have a better field of competitors than our divisions and splitting the pool into 8 divisions this year made for some shallow divisions.

FIRST needs to stop using the waitlist at the Championship. Even if more district systems overtake regionals they will still fill all of these vacant slots with waitlisted teams.

This would make perfect sense if the goal is to have the best robot performance competition possible. I think that have stated that was not their goal when they made this decision.

If you paid attention attention to what Dean and Woodie have been saying for the past 5-10 years you could have seen something like this coming. They consistently said, "it's not about the robot. It is just the vehicle. Take the good from the sports model but reject the negative side that comes with it." They (The board) are devaluing winning. I know that is going to rub some folks the wrong way. This move makes complete sense considering the goals they have set forth.