Chairman's Submission Inconsistencies

[OZ_341]

What we always told our Chairman's team was that you had to treat the Chairman's submission process as if you were going to court.

For every claim you make, you must have EVIDENCE. Photos, video, quotations, clippings, or independent statistics. If we did something amazing but did not have evidence to back it up, we did not put it in our Chairman's Award. If we were making a good faith estimate, we would always go with the lower estimate and then cut it back another 10% for safety sake until it was clearly reasonable to all. It was better to go with a low number, than to be perceived as padding your submission. If a cool event was on the schedule but had not happened yet, we did not include it until it actually happened.

It was a high standard that was sometimes frustrating for the kids. Sometimes they did something really cool but had no record of it or they had an event planned that had not happened yet. But we would not include any claims unless there was clear evidence to back it up.

Teams need to find a standard that works for them, but I think that evidence is the key to credibility.
If I were a judge, I would politely ask teams for this evidence.

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by philso

It seems that they were so focused on implementing the mission of FIRST that they forgot that the judging sessions were their opportunity to justifiably brag about their accomplishments.

That's pretty inspiring in and of itself.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

This question came to me as I was finishing up reading through all the winning regional Chairman's submissions. I'm not saying that I noticed any particular team that had this issue, but to my knowledge, there are no FIRST-provided guidelines for dealing with this sticky situation, which means it's up to us as a community to figure it out until such a time as FIRST gives us guidelines.

Where are these posted?