Appropriate penalties for off-the-field ethical/behavioral violations

[Swampdude]

Here's some ideas:

the inspection takes care of all your mechanical infractions.
the referee's take care of all your on field infractions

so the only uncontrolled matter is the parts right?

If so, how about we have all the teams submit a digital image of all "spare parts" on ship day to FIRST. A digital image team scrapbook will be created and given to the pit judge. On pit opening teams can bring in the items shown in the digital image scrapbook, say each team can have up to 10 items. The pit judge checks off on the items coming into the pit (once for each item) i.e. each item has a check mark next to it. So say on Friday afternoon bluateam comes strolling in with a shiny new transmission thats already been checked off he simply gets turned at the door. This would only apply to assembled items. Loose parts would still be uncontrolled as this would be unmanageable. Plus assembling loose parts in the pit isn't a violation anyway.

So there you have a controlled environment, and eliminated the need for this concern. If this isn't a good plan maybe we could work up a better one, instead of leaving it open for problems.
I could see a traffic jam of people getting spares inspected, so maybe before pits open the judges would come out in the lobby and put approved inspection stickers on the items. Of coarse this also requires container inspection for spares, but they've already been doing container inspections anyway. So just have them send any technical assemblies to the pit inspector to check-off.
We already have to submit digital images of our robots for FIRST to display, so the technical requirement for a digital image already exists. So FIRST should just setup an email address that receives these images and forward them on to each events host. Then after each each event, teams may have assembled new spares in their pit, so a new image is in order Taken their at the event, maybe the pit judge could setup a photo set and organize the image into the check box format and send the image to their next event, superseding the original image.
This would require 1 checkpoint for all pit related items. At UCF many of us found a back door to get into our outdoor tent pits, this created an entry point for uncontrolled items. I guess my biggest problem with this is people traffic. But as a team mentor, I could go along with the technical aspects of this pretty easily.

*edit* maybe for the traffic problem you could just spot check, especially the people carrying a big load of items.