[FRC Blog] Two Championship Survey Results and Path Forward

[ay2b]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Was this survey open to FLL and FTC teams? Was it advertised to them? How about sponsors (both team and event)?

FRC members are not the only stakeholders here.

Originally Posted by Cory

But we are the most visible and highest paying stakeholders here (by a wide margin). FIRST can pretend that doesn't matter... But it does.

I have to disagree with you, Cory. 600 teams at $5,000 each is only $3,000,000. I count 19 "strategic partners"; I believe I remember hearing that was a minimum of $1,000,000 contribution to be listed as such. There's an additional 10 "founding partners", which I suspect is an even larger contribution. That's roughly 10x the money that teams pay, and is only counting the two two tiers of sponsorship.

I'd have to say that the highest paying (by a wide margin) stakeholders are the sponsors.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Basel A

I don't think you can look at this data and reasonably say "most of FRC is opposed to two Championships," especially when the nonvoters likely don't care/are neutral.

It's not 62% of respondents, but you can absolutely look at the data and say that: 55% of respondents are opposed to two Championships. That's most.

We can speculate all we want about the opinions of the people who didn't vote, but there's nothing to delineate the reasonableness of those speculations.

Originally Posted by grstex

I see. But that doesn't actually represent the response to the survey. That's only a poll of those who are biased one way or the other. It's not like the neutral opinions don't count.

It's a measure of mandate that's intended to elucidate the misleading nature of the "average" purported in the blog. As yet we don't know of any way to properly center the data (the actual average of 1 to 10 is 5.5, whereas neutral is a "5"). Directly calculating the relationship between those who fall on one side or the other of neutral provides another sort of insight into the flaw in the scale.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by ay2b

I have to disagree with you, Cory. 600 teams at $5,000 each is only $3,000,000. I count 19 "strategic partners"; I believe I remember hearing that was a minimum of $1,000,000 contribution to be listed as such. There's an additional 10 "founding partners", which I suspect is an even larger contribution. That's roughly 10x the money that teams pay, and is only counting the two two tiers of sponsorship.

I'd have to say that the highest paying (by a wide margin) stakeholders are the sponsors.

I actually completely missed Sean's line about sponsors when I posted. I agree. FRC teams are not as big of a financial contributor to FIRST as the sponsors are.

However, I think if you polled all the sponsors they're probably not stoked that they get two chances to give their company air time...they're probably wondering how the hell they're going to make their steadily shrinking budgets for FIRST cover two events instead of one.

[Taylor]

I very consciously voted a 5 in this.
As an American citizen who has consumed the Democracy Kool-Aid, I'd be sorely disappointed if my carefully considered vote was discarded.

[Drakxii]

Originally Posted by Basel A

Seems to me this is the most reasonable analysis (could argue 7 is favour, but could go either way). Removing neutral voters makes no sense. They have an opinion. Neutral is a totally valid opinion.

I don't think you can look at this data and reasonably say "most of FRC is opposed to two Championships," especially when the nonvoters likely don't care/are neutral.

Please don't assume what non-voters feel. You don't know what they would have voted or why they didn't.

[grstex]

Originally Posted by Siri

It's not 62% of respondents, but you can absolutely look at the data and say that: 55% of respondents are opposed to two Championships. That's most.

We can speculate all we want about the opinions of the people who didn't vote, but there's nothing to delineate the reasonableness of those speculations.

It's a measure of mandate that's intended to elucidate the misleading nature of the "average" purported in the blog. As yet we don't know of any way to properly center the data (the actual average of 1 to 10 is 5.5, whereas neutral is a "5"). Directly calculating the relationship between those who fall on one side or the other of neutral provides another sort of insight into the flaw in the scale.

But you can't say "62.5% of respondents oppose the split." That's just not true. the "mandate" is that 55% oppose the split. you CAN'T just discard 12% of the responses. That's more misleading than average from the blog.

[Dave McLaughlin]

Originally Posted by Taylor

I very consciously voted a 5 in this.
As an American citizen who has consumed the Democracy Kool-Aid, I'd be sorely disappointed if my carefully considered vote was discarded.

Why, if you are neutral in regard to the change? Wouldn't that be like answering with "I don't care" if you were asked what kind of pizza you wanted for dinner, only to get upset when your input is not used?

[The other Gabe]

Originally Posted by Dave McLaughlin

Why, if you are neutral in regard to the change? Wouldn't that be like answering with "I don't care" if you were asked what kind of pizza you wanted for dinner, only to get upset when your input is not used?

no. it means I'm not sure yet, and want to see how stuff pans out still.

[Racer26]

Originally Posted by Basel A

Seems to me this is the most reasonable analysis (could argue 7 is favour, but could go either way). Removing neutral voters makes no sense. They have an opinion. Neutral is a totally valid opinion.

I don't think you can look at this data and reasonably say "most of FRC is opposed to two Championships," especially when the nonvoters likely don't care/are neutral.

Karthik has reconciled the unevenly weighted scale by simply clumping the most opposed, and most favoured 3 choices together and leaving the rest as neutral. Counting 7 as favour would make his Favour and Oppose buckets different sizes again.

And his result? I don't know how you can see a 48/29/23 split and suggest anything other than that "most" people are opposed.

The whole thing just really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Some around here know I did not participate in FRC this year due to some issues last year ultimately resulting in my leaving the team I was with. The details surrounding that are unimportant.

I've always been a pretty vocal person when I think things aren't how they ought to be, and many of the responses I've seen from FIRST management come off as being more about saving face and keeping up appearances than they are about correcting mistakes and being the best organization we can be. That's never sat right with me, and ultimately, I decided to sit back and take a year off, and see how I feel about returning to mentoring a team in 2016.

Everything about the championsplit, and this survey, and Frank's blog about it is screaming to me that FIRST is an organization that has lost touch with its goals. I'd *love* to see the distribution of the students-only 4.3 average. The whole point of this is to inspire them. If they are similarly distributed to what we can glean from the overall numbers, only slightly more heavily biased to the low-end? That's terrifying and should be a serious wake-up call to HQ.

This shouldn't be about spin-doctoring statistics to try and appease the masses with "See? We're not *really* doing something you all hate". If an announcement has decades-long mentors suggesting that they are willing to leave the program in favour of building their own within hours of said announcement? THERE'S SOMETHING REALLY WRONG.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Dave McLaughlin

Why, if you are neutral in regard to the change? Wouldn't that be like answering with "I don't care" if you were asked what kind of pizza you wanted for dinner, only to get upset when your input is not used?

Having a neutral opinion of something is not equivalent to "I don't care."

[Dave McLaughlin]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Having a neutral opinion of something is not equivalent to "I don't care."

I apologize for my terse language, would it have been more appropriate to say "Neither Oppose nor Favor" a proposed pizza selection?

[Siri]

Originally Posted by grstex

But you can't say "62.5% of respondents oppose the split." That's just not true. the "mandate" is that 55% oppose the split. you CAN'T just discard 12% of the responses. That's more misleading than average from the blog.

I agree that the statement "62.5% of respondents oppose the split" is not true. I suspect everyone does; it's math. As a side note, the statement "the respondents to the survey oppose the championsplit 62.5% to 37.5% (after removing the '"5s")" is completely true.

However, unless you have a mathematical or industry standard to support the conclusion that 62.5% is more misleading than 4.45, I disagree. At the very least, Richard actually told us directly what his calculation was in the midst of a discussion that already took issue with the neutrality of the 5 average. Frank left his misleading calculation to be discovered, which is a huge problem in itself. I don't think that this was intentional by Frank. A very big part of this problem is that this is an intuitive scale on its face, but he should've done his homework before making a highly misleading and unqualified statement that included both the term 'average' and the term 'neither oppose nor favor'.

The correct 'intuitive' truth that we're looking for--i.e. what the average looks like when centered about neutral--is somewhere between Richard's calculation and Frank's average. There's no way to access it. Do you have a better method of getting closer? This is an iterative issue; Karthik took one approach, I tried another averaging technique.

[Rangel(kf7fdb)]

I'd be curious to know how many active users their are on CD. Many have been using the hive mind argument to show how the negative opinion of champs is only the most vocal people but I think this survey pretty much counteracts that. It doesn't really surprise me though after I had talked to many AZ FRC alumni who had pretty similar thoughts about champs. Wasn't sure about everywhere else though. I agree with others though about what was the point of the data if the results weren't surprising. I disagree that the point of the poll was about how to improve the 2 champs when a lot of the discussion just focused on what people thought about it. And why does what people think matter if it isn't going to change a single thing.

[Mike Schreiber]

As someone who has participated in the planning and execution of customer surveys and clinics before, I'm just going to leave this here for future reference.

Likert Scale

[jeremylee]

Originally Posted by Cory

I actually completely missed Sean's line about sponsors when I posted. I agree. FRC teams are not as big of a financial contributor to FIRST as the sponsors are.

However, I think if you polled all the sponsors they're probably not stoked that they get two chances to give their company air time...they're probably wondering how the hell they're going to make their steadily shrinking budgets for FIRST cover two events instead of one.

This worries me even more. I don't see 2 "championships" bringing in much for additional sponsorship dollars, but I do see significant cost associated with putting on a 2nd "championship".