Saving Seats Epidemic

[BL0X3R]

I believe one thing that may not completely solve the problem, but will greatly help, is to have the better seats reserved for the teams who are in the current match.

I don't know about everyone else's teams but 4488 tends to follow a pattern (I know, a pattern after one regional and one trip to worlds ): the scouters are always there, and when one of the matches we participate on comes everyone but the drive team can be seen in the stands (if anyone in Curie saw us attempting to save seats this is why)

If we were given seats to use during our matches, our scouters would have gladly taken about seven seats and set up their station there, joined everyone during the matches, then gone back to their scouting area.

I saw this strategy in practice on Einstein, though slightly modified (I believe all the Division Champions were given the center rows) and it worked rather well for those teams, the only problem was that the other four divisions were all crowded into the left over space. If this were to be used for each division, you'd only have to reserve a quarter of that space, because it's for one match combination instead of four, and you'd have one division's worth of the other teams that want to watch the match in the other areas instead of the entirety of the championship participators.

The best part? Everyone will, at a variable number of points (this year it was eight) be able to watch their robot that they've worked so hard on compete. All of the teams there deserve this opportunity to watch their teams up close, not just the ones that got seats early and stayed there for the duration of the competition.

The few unsolved problems I know of are the awards and if a few very large teams are all in one match at the same time. We could use the seating method we use right now for the awards, but I'm sure we can come up with a better solution with time. As for the large teams problem, there are some solutions I currently have, though none of them quite work for me (the first is to have a really large reserved area, restricting the other teams not competing. The second is to expand the area when necessary and essentially temporarily kick people out of their seats, which I REALLY don't want to see happen)

I hope you'll all take this suggestion into consideration, refine it, find and fix issues with it, and mitigate or even solve the problems proposed with this system.

[Chi Meson]

Our team unfortunately tried to follow the rule and as a result we never got to sit fully together as a team.

When we had a game on the second match of one day, there were at least two teams in our division where 50+ seats were saved by 3 or 4 kids. The rest of the team were not even there when the matches started. No team in the second match. No team in the third match.

We managed to scrounge half a row of seat (up to the tape stretched across several rows by yet another team, who were, at least, mostly there--I got glares as I moved the tape down one seat so I could sit down). As the pit crew and mentors arrived for our match, there was nowhere near us for them to sit so...

They had to find the empty seats scattered among the other teams

Later in the day, our team managed, like an amoeba, to soak up various adjacent seats (our block looked like the state of Maryland [seriously, check it out on a map]), and after I gave up my seat for one of our students I stood in the aisle.

For about five minutes

looking at the team behind us who had four seats taken up by scouting boxes. Subtle hints were ignored. A direct question of "do all those boxes need to take up all those seats?" resulted in no effect.

So yeah, it's a problem. Everyone knows you're not supposed to, yet everyone does. The best teams do. Chairman Award Winning teams do.

If you are reading this, chances are your team does. And of course we have in the past (though we have never gotten any "good" seats because we don't send out the 3 kids an hour ahead).

Here's my solution:
Rule 1: One person in the stands gets to save 1 seat! If you need 50 seats, you better send at least 25 people into the stands to keep them.

2nd rule: a person in the stands gets seating precedence over any t-shirt, pom-pom, pennant, flag, number, or box. No argument.

[Nathan Pell]

The Pink team won the Team Spirit award at championships as they did in 2012. The Pink team doesn't like to 'block people'. They always sit down when the matches start. They are cheering for every team every match - that is why they are standing.

Originally Posted by Marc S.

I think the GP card could go either way. Yeah your taking their seats that they are trying so hard to defend, but they are trying to save seats with almost no one there.

At SVR I talked to a rookie mentor from another team, and he mentioned to me how ungraciously professional he thought the pink team was for taking up half the stands in the center section of the stadium. "Their spirit people take up the same amount of room as the scouts from 20 other teams." he said. Its an interesting thought, 90% of their seats went to cheerers who loved to stand and block the view of people behind them, but they did get there first. I only mention the identity of this team because they ironically won the championship Gracious Professionalism award.

So it begs the question, what is more graciously professional? Is it, "we only need these higher quality seats for our scouts", or "they got their first so we should respect their right to take up as many seats as they can"?

[LucasM]

Originally Posted by Carl C

FIRST needs to either allow seats to be reserved or implement a better system.

I think this is a great idea. It would help mitigate the "land rush" situation when the doors open.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by JamesSpencer

...

Oh, the seat-savers were out in full force on Galileo and I wanted to pull my hair out at how unbearable some were.

I would like to take this time to thank 1114 and 610 for "doing it right". Both of those teams were doubtlessly awake before the sun even rose on the East Coast, and they took up as many seats as needed by their team because all of their members were actually present.

Like I said in another thread, teams need to educate everyone on their team concerning all of the rules, including parents on this specific rule.

Also, I know for the VA regional, there was a supervisor who seemed especially designated to prevent seat saving, even to the point where he wanted us to not not have anything in seats to give off the appearance we were saving seats. I guess you could have a volunteer babysit the stands, but really, if we need a volunteer to babysit the stands we have a bigger problem.

[Woolly]

If your average team needs ~10 people to scout, and there are 60 teams at a regional, what you end up with is 600 people redundantly recording what is mostly the same data.
If, somehow, everyone could agree on a scouting standard before they show up at the regional, you could have a representative from every team do all the scouting, and it could probably be uploaded to a neutral location on the web. Then, any fancy metrics/calculations that a team are doing just have to be set up to pull information from that neutral source.
Thus the need to sit in the bleachers and be together the whole event is alleviated for most teams.

Now, how do you get everyone to agree on a scouting standard? Well, for one the regional committee could hold a meeting 2 weeks before the event where everyone shares what data they need for scouting. It would not take much to hash out, as every year almost everyone's scouting sheets contain the same data.

[CENTURION]

Originally Posted by Woolly

If your average team needs ~10 people to scout, and there are 60 teams at a regional, what you end up with is 600 people redundantly recording what is mostly the same data.
If, somehow, everyone could agree on a scouting standard before they show up at the regional, you could have a representative from every team do all the scouting, and it could probably be uploaded to a neutral location on the web. Then, any fancy metrics/calculations that a team are doing just have to be set up to pull information from that neutral source.
Thus the need to sit in the bleachers and be together the whole event is alleviated for most teams.

Now, how do you get everyone to agree on a scouting standard? Well, for one the regional committee could hold a meeting 2 weeks before the event where everyone shares what data they need for scouting. It would not take much to hash out, as every year almost everyone's scouting sheets contain the same data.

1306 is working on this

Anyone interested should check out this thread

We rolled out the CrowdScout system at the Wisconsin Regional, and in Curie Division this year, and it worked wonderfully, so we will definitely be continuing development of the system (streamlining data entry, making things easier for teams), and the organization around it (deciding on what data is needed, etc.)

[jessss]

At the Minnesota Regionals the first few rows of the center section of seats were reserved for teams. Each team got two seats for scouting, the team number was placed on each seat which was nice. It gave every team an opportunity to use the two seats to scout, record matches or even just sit and watch matches. It was nice because each team knew that they had these two seats and didn't have to worry about saving the seats. I know most teams need more than two scouters but I think it helped at our regionals.

[Woolly]

Originally Posted by CENTURION

1306 is working on this

Anyone interested should check out this thread

We rolled out the CrowdScout system at the Wisconsin Regional, and in Curie Division this year, and it worked wonderfully, so we will definitely be continuing development of the system (streamlining data entry, making things easier for teams), and the organization around it (deciding on what data is needed, etc.)

Right, now if only we could require every team to send 1 rep to scout, such that it becomes plainly obvious to teams where to get good scouting info, rather than showing up to alliance selections and just picking by rank/reputation/#of LEDs.

[spydan]

Originally Posted by CENTURION

1306 is working on this

Anyone interested should check out this thread

We rolled out the CrowdScout system at the Wisconsin Regional, and in Curie Division this year, and it worked wonderfully, so we will definitely be continuing development of the system (streamlining data entry, making things easier for teams), and the organization around it (deciding on what data is needed, etc.)

Team 708 was thinking about making our scouting information publicly available. I am glad that someone has created something like this. I will try and see if our team would like to implement this! We, too get frustrated with the seat saving.We make sure to have people be using the seats if we are going to need them.

[karomata]

The bottom line is that you can only control the action of yourself and those of your own team. If teams wish to not be graciously professional and wish to save seats even though they're not supposed to, theres nothing that others are able to do about it other than control their own actions. And we really don't need to complain to FIRST about the issue, I think FIRST already has enough to worry about. Teams will do as they wish, and instead of making an issue over such a minor thing, we could just rise above their level of constructive attitude and only worry about conducting ourselves graciously and professionaly. You can see the field from anywhere in any of the stands at any of the venues, the venues were built to work that way. If there simply aren't enough seats, then just communicate that with the team reserving seats. If they continue to refuse, then you should talk to your regional committee. But other than that we really shouldn't complain to anyone about it. To sum it up, I hate to use slang, but nothing really describes the situation like it is better than saying: haters gonna hate.

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by karomata

The bottom line is that you can only control the action of yourself and those of your own team. If teams wish to not be graciously professional and wish to save seats even though they're not supposed to, theres nothing that others are able to do about it other than control their own actions. And we really don't need to complain to FIRST about the issue, I think FIRST already has enough to worry about. Teams will do as they wish, and instead of making an issue over such a minor thing, we could just rise above their level of constructive attitude and only worry about conducting ourselves graciously and professionaly. You can see the field from anywhere in any of the stands at any of the venues, the venues were built to work that way. If there simply aren't enough seats, then just communicate that with the team reserving seats. If they continue to refuse, then you should talk to your regional committee. But other than that we really shouldn't complain to anyone about it. To sum it up, I hate to use slang, but nothing really describes the situation like it is better than saying: haters gonna hate.

But we've already left it up to the teams to police themselves. That's how we got to this mess in the first place. To just simply say: it's not that big a deal is to act as if it didn't happen when it's obviously a problem that needs to be dealt with. And if it requires FIRST to intervien personally to solve it then they should.

[Marc S.]

If FIRST is going to intervene then here's a solution that I hope for.

10 seats be saved for each teams scouts. As a scout I know that 6 people is not enough. Ideally a team ha6 people scouting data, a data entering person, a team sheet organizer, and 2 strategic scouts. You may even be able to argue 11 or 12 seats cause having a mentor is useful too. Having two rows of 5 or 6 would be nice.

Also, wouldn't this be up to individual regional/distict coordinators?

[Carolyn_Grace]

Ahem....here is my modest proposal:

It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through these great competitions, or travel from event to event as volunteers, when they see the walkways and the stairways crowded with unfortunate students of the FIRST generation, attempting to view their team's matches and importuning other teams for just a little bit of their space.

These vagrant teams, instead of enjoying prime seating, are forced to employ all their time begging for their helpless students who, as they wander aimlessly around the venue, either turn seat-thieves for want of their own space, or leave their dear native team, to fight for seating among their opponent Red Alliance, or sell themselves to the event coordinators, hoping for at least a seat for one match.

I think it is agreed by all alliances, that this prodigious number of seatless-students at the heels of their mentors, and frequently of their sponsors, is in the present deplorable state of the FIRST kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of providing these children sound and enjoyable seating among the elite, would deserve so well of the ChiefDelphi community, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the FIRST nation.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing Michigander of my acquaintance in FiM, that a young healthy student well geeked, is, after 6 weeks of build season, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether fried, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve as a side to roasted corn on the cob or cheap $2 nachos in a bag at IRI.

Those teams who are populated (as I must confess, growth is inevitable) may flea the carcass; the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable handouts for other teams, and team-shirts for next year...

A Modest Proposal

[Kimmeh]

Originally Posted by Carolyn_Grace

I have been assured by a very knowing Michigander of my acquaintance in FiM, that a young healthy student well geeked, is, after 6 weeks of build season, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether fried, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve as a side to roasted corn on the cob or cheap $2 nachos in a bag at IRI.

First off, I found this whole thing beautiful. I love A Modest Proposal.

But I do question if anyone is "delicious, nourishing, or wholesome" after the fare one eats for the six weeks of build season...