Let's Put the Professionalism back in Gracious Professionalism

[Graham Donaldson]

First, to Katy: THANK YOU for bringing this topic up. Nothing can be improved if we don't know what to improve upon. Stating grievances/problems/concerns/issues in a professional, level-headed, unbiased manner, should, in my opinion, be encouraged and applauded- not attacked. A negative comment may be directed at you/your team/whatever, but that doesn't mean you should take it as an insult. It's constructive criticism. It is something to improve upon. The best companies ask the people who work for them what to improve on. Members of CD and the FIRST community, I should hope we are not afraid to voice our concerns to the world.

Originally Posted by JaneYoung

I'm not quite understanding this post/thread.

To begin with, I don't understand how this post is anonymously coauthored. Katy has posted this/started this thread and Katy is the one who will receive the responses.

The second thought that comes to mind is that this is obviously a post that has some concerns but I don't understand what the concerns are. There are generalities but no specifics that I can grasp and that may be why I'm somewhat confused.

Second, to Jane: [to be read in an explanatory tone, not offended]

In terms of the anonymous co-author-ing, as I read it, it meant that someone sent a message to Katy that proposed the issue, asking her to post it since she was a senior member, and they were a junior member afraid of getting slammed. As for co-authoring, my guess would be that Katy added a little to it. At least that's how I interpreted it.

I interpreted the post as intending to be a general discussion about how people are afraid to post their concerns. A possible reason that we can't find any specifics is that there are no specifics (because members are afraid to post them). I'm sure some are somewhere, though...

[JesseK]

I fully agree and have been correctly accused of every instance of the original post on various occasions. The cohesion necessary for the varieties of situations of FIRST FRC teams to exist in the same realm takes tremendous effort to set forth, and I believe FIRST generally has a well-rounded framework to allow for it. Some teams have everything funded; some scrape the community and KOP for all they're worth. Some teams have vast ambitions with mentoring resources; others have a couple of teachers with a few students. All of these teams have an opinion, yet I'm not so sure of the effect their voice has.

All of these teams are also affected by any nitpicky technicality in the plethora of data there is to assimilate, and it's easy for many of us to forget that as we argue here on CD. It's extremely difficult to remember every detail of every rule and every update, and every [insert random usfirst.org link here] posted on the website. Then on top of that, teams have to build a bot. It's easy to get lost in the data and confused by misinterpretations or unrealised links in the rules. Bad assumptions also play a large role in arguments and many times it's hard to see how to break the news to the arguer without losing GP in either respect. If all of that wasn't enough, the growth of FRC teams each year means there is an exponential increase in the amount of opinions and available experience for all of us to discuss.

I'm glad Katy has put this on her shoulders and I support it; though support from my stance right now is the mere conjectures and opinions within these words. The question is, how to do you point out non-GP behavior without lacking GP yourself? I've witnessed several non GP situations at competitions in the last 2 years -- some stem from frustration about a bot and its expectations while others stem from overcompetitiveness. Still others stem from interpretations and the underlying stubbornness of engineers that FIRST forgets to inform students of. In one FSU* students are expected to trust their creativeness somehow amongst [sometimes] overzealous mentors and pressure to succeed with their bot and school. Inherently, it's hard to tell where to draw the line between GP and trusting your creativity in these situations: if every suggestion is ignored, every attempt failed or every word choice incorrect it is next to impossible to believe you can take another risk at being stubborn while contributing to a discussion or argument. In person or on CD, it's easy to open your mouth without thinking twice to denounce such a situation or thought. I've done it and I'm sure 99% of the rest of us have too. Where do we go forward from here?

*FSU = FIRST Standard Unit, = 6.5 weeks of building, if you were at VCU listening to Dave

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by JesseK

The question is, how to do you point out non-GP behavior without lacking GP yourself?

The best way I can think of is to concentrate on the goal rather than the shortfall. Try not to wag a finger and say "Don't do that." Give some incentive for the behavior to change for the better, and say "Do that." The details will be completely different for each situation, of course, and some people are by nature better at it than others, but we need to keep in mind what we're trying to promote.