IEEE: A Call to Action from Dean Kamen

[Billfred]

Billfred says "That's the bomb-diggity!"

I do have to call him, though, on the growth. Growth can be a good thing, but there is a flip side...(quote from www.mrholloman.net)

I'm always hearing people say "If you stop growing, you die." Or, "I hope this program really grows!"

Why is growth so coveted? Unrestrained growth is Cancer—really! Cancer occurs when the body gets the idea that it needs to grow. Tumors switch on genes that are supposed to be off, in an attempt to make things happen. Tumors have been found that contained teeth, hair...

You do not die when you stop growing. Growth should not be a goal in and of itself. Every organism should grow until it reaches equilibrium, and then stop.

I'm reminded of a line from The Matrix, when Agent Smith points out that Mankind is the only organism that does not reach this equilibrium—instead, it grows and expands and consumes resources until there is nothing left.

It goes back to the old problem of quality vs. quantity, IMHO. We could get a FIRST team in every high school in the land in five years. But would that be the best thing for FIRST? I'm not so sure. Growing at such a rapid pace (going from some 1000 teams to covering the hundreds of thousands of American high schools) puts strains on everything, from sponsors to regionals to teams that mentor a lot to FIRST itself. You'd need to pretty much rent the Georgia Dome for another week to put together that many kits.

The other big problem is the culture. Right now, FIRST is a (relatively) small, tight community that's willing to help each other whenever they can. If we grow at such a pace, I fear that folks wouldn't be as close, and it'd take a lot of work to get kids out of that "they're out to get us" mentality (which was posted at least once on our message board in hindsight) and into the way FIRST works. Otherwise, things might evolve into a different FIRST, one that I'm not so sure I want to see.

I hope this doesn't turn into a growth debate, but I just don't know whether that kind of growth is healthy.