"Spare Parts" Rules Are Broken

[Katie Reynolds]

Originally Posted by MikeDubreuil

... They intentionally make the rules vague so they can bend them at any time. They claim the rules should be followed with common sense rather than a judicial sense.
Gracious professionalism keeps us all looking the other way if a team breaks the rules. To the point where we'll allow a team to break a rule and then compete agaisnt them knowing they broke a rule. Why don't we tell anyone? Because you're supposed to be GP. If you were to tell, who would you tell? There should be a FIRST police officer, but there's not.
FIRST has been designed from the ground up without a set of checks and balances. There are no consequences for breaking the rules. FIRST just hopes people will be honest, a blind faith if you ask me.

Teams will continue bending and breaking the rules, gracious professional teams will continue looking the other way.

Can you imagine how thick the manual would be if FIRST outlined every single situation, so as to make the rules perfectly, black and white, no questions about it clear? My printer wouldn't be able to handle it!!!

I've never heard Gracious Professionalism defined as looking the other way when someone is breaking the rules. If you see something shady going on, tell someone about it! A judge, a referee, the pit announcer -- someone! There are consequences for breaking the rules. Ask any team that's ever gotten a penalty for something at a competition or disqualified from a match.

It's obvious that FIRST does hope people will be honest, and not try to break/bend the rules to gain an unfair advantage. That teams wouldn't bring a spare robot to the competition to swap out parts that they modified post-build. I would hope the same thing. Maybe it's just me, but I've always held FIRSTers to be people who knew the difference between right and wrong, between cheating and being inventive. Call me blind as well, but I thought the majority of us were above that.

FYI: I did a google search for "Gracious Professionalism" and got over 1,200 results. Scanning over the pages, almost ALL were from FIRST's and team's websites. Seems like most people get it. Or at least whoever writes the content for their webpage does.

[Gabriel]

[quote=Katie Reynolds]Can you imagine how thick the manual would be if FIRST outlined every single situation, so as to make the rules perfectly, black and white, no questions about it clear? My printer wouldn't be able to handle it!!! [quote]

Dean and Co. have been railing against lawyers for a long time, and this idea of shortening the manual and declaring that "words mean what they mean" is a good one. Unfortunately we aren't mind readers and in some cases FIRST hasn't done a great job of making the intention of a particular ruling clear. My interpretation might be different from the judges interpretation which might be different from the authors intention. This problem is only compounded by the number of rule changes during the season. For example, when I read the rule saying that tape can't be used as a fastener, I interpret that to mean that you can't wrap tape around your wheels as a traction device, but at UTC the judges suggested that we do this. The problem is that unless the rules say WHY we're not supposed to use tape as a fastener I don't know how to apply that rule. Dave seems to think that FIRSTs intentions are obvious, but Dave is the one having the intentions in the first place, for those of us just reading through the document they clearly aren't. I don't think its fair for FIRST to expect us to understand their intentions if those intentions aren't articulated precisely. What's so terrible about saying "To keep the challenge fair for everyone we give every team an equal amount of time, unfortunately, since we can't schedule 26 regionals on the same weekend some teams will have more time to work after the regional than others, since it would defeat the entire purpose of having a six-week build schedule teams cannot use the time between the ship date and the regional to work on the robot, the exceptions to this rule are x, y, and z because of the following reasons." The rules don't read like this at all. Dave, lawyers don't talk about simple ideas and they don't make simple arguments, they have to use words in weird ways sometimes because the language doesn't necessarily fit the ideas. Its like talking about "offense" and "defense" in this years game, the words don't really apply to this competition so you have to spell out what you mean by them before you use them or you'll cause confusion. FIRST doesn't do simple ideas either, there's a reasoning behind the rules that needs to be spelled out because nothing in FIRST is "intuitively obvious".