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#46
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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#47
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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#48
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
This is bizarrely passive aggressive and not at all helpful.
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#49
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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#50
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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#51
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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#52
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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More matches at an event with fewer teams also has the advantage of getting play time with all the teams at the event and many more opportunities to learn from the matches. We've had 6 weeks (or more) for working on robots, now is the time to run them. You bring up good points for the other side though, and preferences here will differ. |
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#53
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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Districts for 208 MN teams would require (208*2/40=10.4) at least 11 district events with 40 teams each. Including about 20 teams who are just across the border adds another event, so 12 events (though this sort of arrangement is not well supported by HQ at the moment). Could possibly get by with 2 fields, 6 weeks of districts, DCMP week 7, but inevitably a 3rd field would be needed with any growth (which also allows a week 6 DCMP, to ease CMP planning). This is 3 times as many events, big load on the system, but better for teams. To echo another thread, the teams should be the focus. The challenge is how do we get there, and maybe adding individual regionals at first is better than nothing and a way to gradually build infrastructure. |
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#54
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
Aren,
I think you need to take a closer look into match schedules and you will see that many people are looking at 30-35 teams per event and that makes the event total go to 14. One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is how many towns have hotel space for 30 teams. |
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#55
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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Let me put it this way: I reffed 4/2 events I was signed up to ref this year. Basically every event within 2 hours driving. Yep. I added 2 events late (still not sure I ever ended up in VIMS for one of them). I did some back of the envelope math, and there is no way we'd have been able to pull together enough ref crews to cover the 9 events needed for the quantity of teams involved if we'd been in a district system. On the plus side, now that the press-gangs--er, VCs and their minions--have finished recruiting for the year, there's a chance that we've got a solid core group of refs for next year...Assuming they all come back... And that's just one of the many pieces that has to fall into place. Repeat for all your key volunteers, repeat for the non-key volunteers... |
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#56
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
The members should be the #1 focus of what we as volunteers, mentors, and staff do.
If you had districts in the right places with the right amount of teams, you could potentially not need very many hotels if people were able to stay at their homes and travel to the venue each day. To echo the expense and time to get districts going, why don't you get started now to ensure that FIRST in Minnesota can continue to keep growing at a reasonable pace? It's inevitable that Minnesota will out grow the regional system (and maybe even the district system). When thinking about pursuing or not pursing this change, remember the student members. They should always be put first and the decision should ultimately benefit them. |
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#57
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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Hotel availability is an important factor I hadn't considered. |
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#58
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
Should the teams be the focus? Or should achieving culture change be the focus?
Granted, those two are typically going to go hand in hand. But if underlying circumstances create an environment in which greater cultural change in the surrounding region can be achieved by fewer higher profile events, I don't think it's the wrong call to go that route (presuming the organizers have good reason to believe that's the case). I'm not saying that's what's happening in Minnesota or anywhere else. In fact, I'd probably wager that, in general, the district format probably does a better job at changing the culture of the surrounding area than the regional format does. However, I am challenging the assertion that the team's experience is the only factor that should matter, which has been implied here and elsewhere. While it's certainly a massive factor, giving a service to the teams is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is culture change. |
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#59
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
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So, once again, here's my offer to help: If anyone from Minnesota wants more experience volunteering and learning key volunteer roles, please contact me. I'm the Senior Volunteer Coordinator for Indiana, and I would be happy to have you come visit us and train. We are currently training a lot of new people from our own area, but we will do the best to fit you in and help give you experience. Come down and talk to us, ask us questions about everything that goes into managing our district area. The door is open. |
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#60
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Re: Experience promoting districts in Minnesota
The biggest problem with the regional system is that so many teams only get to compete in one event. Iterating on the design after seeing it perform on the real field in a real competition is huge. I would argue that improving the robot after the first event is the highest impact engineering experience that FRC offers.
When people are pointing out some of the difficulties involved with creating more events, I hope they will avoid implying that districts can't be done. It can be done. |
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