Communications -- Solutions/Ideas

[IKE]

This is an excerpt taken from the pdf sent to MI teams my comments in red:
These seem like reasonable and quantifiable goals.

COMPETITION EVENTS: KEY IMPROVEMENTS
More Affordable: Make FIRST more cost effective
• Reduce cost to participate (minimum cost to compete from $6K to $5K)
• Minimize time away from school and work
(for single event teams time away is equal with 2 events, for multi-event teams time is equal to or less than previous)
• Reduce travel costs
(This will make for a good end of season survey question)
• Reduce event production costs to free up money for teams
(This is within their plan.)
• Eliminate shipping costs
(The plan for this is already formulated. It actually uses a format that FIRST used to do. Again this will be a good post season feedback question)
More Accessible: Make events local
• Increase the number of events so teams can play closer to home
(this is the addition of 4 more district level events spread out throughout the state)
• Increase visibility and give families, schools, communities, local government, businesses,
and media easy access to local FIRST competitions
More Rewarding: Let teams play more
• Guarantee each team a minimum of two events in Michigan to better balance the hard work and time spent building with time spent playing
(minimum match schedule will be up from 8-10 at a traditional regional to 24 matches)
• Increase the number of matches per team per event
(again they want to increase from 8-10 to 12 matches minimum)

The whole PDF actually parallels the VEX FAQ reasonably well. I believe that the PDF was only sent to MI teams as they were the ones directly effected, but one of the MI team captains already posted the PDF in the main thread.

It is very similar to the FAQ that FIRST put out:
http://www.usfirst.org/uploadedFiles...g_revJul31.pdf

This FAQ was updated 7/31 due to some of the questions that had been arising.

I like the FiM "Idea Box" idea. In practice it might be hard to post a different answer to each post as many people don't take the time to read through submissions and post the same stuff over and over. Is a canned answer reasonable for a canned question?

As far as to get FIRST feedback, should questions be posted into the FIRST forum, or is there a better area to get feedback?