Town Hall Meeting Video

[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.