MassFIRST

[Michael R. Lee]

Wouldn't the team leaders be the first people to found MassFIRST anyway? Or ar least they'd be the most likely representatives to it. From then you elect an overall board of people (which these team leaders may be on or at least someone they know they can trust to be on it).

[Adam Y.]

I would go for creating Mass FIRST and then work on the regional and a workshop like the one in Indiana. This way we can increase the communication between teams and get together a large enough group that when we want to do something complicated (like invitationals, workshops, and regionals) we can just look for a show of hands and form a committee.

I would gladly do that if I go to college in Boston. I was thinking of seeing if I could hold workshops in the Boston Musuem since they all ready do that with robotics. Boston is such a interesting place and it sure beats New York in terms of people and activities(except for baseball).

[Gabriel]

This sounds like a great idea. How do we start?

[generalbrando]

I think a good start is to gather at many people as possible who are interested in making it happen and then start discussing all these ideas. So...tell all your friends!

[David Kelly]

I think you guys should start out small. Maybe not even have it have 501(c)3 status first. I'm not sure how well 'bonded' the teams are in the state, but that will make a huge difference on how well your organizaition will run. In reality, IndianaFIRST has been in existance since the 2000 season, i believe. Starting out small with a few workshops once a year will be great. Then every year gradually build up to where you need to be. I think Indiana is at the point in time where we need to get an established organization going to further build awareness and support. Andy Baker's house is getting a little too small for us to have meetings.


Let us know if you need any advice or help with anything, we all would be glad to help.

[Erin Rapacki]

Cool... thanks for the info. Obviously, I don't think we have any intention of making this a big organization any time soon, but it would be nice to get a small group of people together to initiate things like workshops and such.

Mass teams aren't well bonded at all (as I see it), and it would be nice to change that.

[miketwalker]

Originally posted by Erin Rapacki
it would be nice to get a small group of people together to initiate things like workshops and such.

If you want to get workshops going, Cindy Abrams at FIRST will help you out with what you need. (603) 666-3906 x403 <-- so you might wanna call her if you are curious about how you can go about it cause she'll help get you information and such. I hope that helps.

[Gabriel]

Originally posted by generalbrando
I think a good start is to gather at many people as possible who are interested in making it happen and then start discussing all these ideas. So...tell all your friends!

I might be able to get my college to host a meeting. We're in Berkshire County which is a shlep for the Boston teams but it might help to promote FIRST in Western Mass, where teams are especially scarce.

[Andy Baker]

Here is what we have done in Indiana:

1. Conduct an "Indiana FIRST Team Leaders" meeting in the fall. This meeting get us ready for the workshops and ensures that the new teams have mentors in their area. This takes place usually in Sept. or Oct.

2. Conduct a "workshop" day so that all of the teams in the state can bring all of their members to come and learn about FIRST. We have meetings about everything from RCU to C Programming.

3. Host a remote kickoff. This is another chance for teams to get together and interact. Teams get their kits shipped directly to Kokomo for easy pickup, while their team leaders can still go to NH for the big kickoff.

4. Host an off-season competition. Borrow a playing field from FIRST and get the right people to run the event. Start out small, find a good facility, and build it from there.

5. Create a website to bring state teams together. David Kelly set ours up at www.indianafirst.org. Not only can we communicate between teams this way, but if we run across a possible state-wide sponsor or organization, then we can refer them to this website and we appear farily organized.

6. Have open lines of communication between teams. We often email each other or call each other.

... and have patience for each other as each team goes through its own issues.

Good luck!

Andy B.

[generalbrando]

Thanks Andy!

I think it would be a good idea for Mass area teams to post again here and discuss which of the ideas they'd like to duplicate and which are most important to start with.

[Ken Leung]

The first thing to do is to have the team leader meeting. It is very important that you have a face to face meeting with the dedicated FIRST-a-holics around your area. It makes everything more real, and you can get through a lot of discussion in a meeting. You can figure out how much everyone is willing to do.

And be realistic. All of you have a robotics team, and competition is starting in January. So chances are, you will be really busy during 6 weeks and build period. So focus your discussion for offseason/preseason first.

Having a remote kickoff is fairly easy to do, if you just want to watch the broadcast together. What we do here is we arrange it with NASA Ames and get a feed coming to San Jose State University (not just the internet broadcast), and we setup a room so that about 4 team representative per team can gather together and watch the game on a big projection screen. Then if you want to have scoring objects at the remote kickoff, you will have to arrange it with the regional director around your area to set something up.

As far as workshops goes, you can talk about what kind of workshop you want to have, but most important of all you have to find the teachers for team. The team leaders, teachers, engineers are great resources for the workshops. Have a panel of discussion about how to run a team, or get a programming workshop going, or a drive train workshop. The limiting factor will be how many teachers you will find. When the first workshop happens, chances are the teachers teaching the workshops will get their team to come attend the workshop, so you should get a pretty good turn out. You just have to find a venue, like a local university, with enough class rooms and parking. Just figure out what equipment the teachers will need, such as projectors, and you got yourself a workshop.

Also, as I remember correctly Erin is having an off season competition next year. This will be a great way to see how strong of a group you will have. Have all the teams interested in MassFIRST volunteer at that competition. It will make the competition much more friendlier.


Finally, the most important of all, take advantage of this chance to get all the contact information in one place. Set up an e-mail list so that you can send e-mail to the community. Don't spam the list too much, or else people won't want to stay on the list.

Good Luck!

[ChrisH]

One tip. Charge something for everything from the beginning. Sad to say but you need an operating budget and that needs to come from somewhere.

Here in Southern California one team, 22, started having workshops, off season and preseason competitions as a service to the area teams. They did this at no charge, absorbing the costs in their team budget. There weren't that many people involved and it was more trouble to do the book keeping than it was worth. As the number of FIRST teams grew, they could no longer continue to do so. What single team here could realisically expect to host workshops for 31 teams, and over 300 people and still have a competition budget? But that is how many showed up for our workshops a couple of weeks ago.

So they got some teams together and started SCRRF. SCRRF needs to charge for our events. We can't even get a facility with out paying some sort of rent, let alone all the other "little" expenses. For the Fall Classic we looked into having a FIRST field, but we were talking several thousand dollars just in shipping costs to get it here. So we used one team's practice field ( a retired FIRST field) instead. But even then we had to rent a truck to get it to the competition site and rent the site itself.

Now we have teams complaining about having to pay for things that have always been free. They were NEVER free, it is just that in the past somebody else carried the cost for them, out of the goodness of their hearts.

So charge something from the beginning and save yourself a lot of whining in the future.

[Jeremy Roberts]

Originally posted by ChrisH
So charge something from the beginning and save yourself a lot of whining in the future.

I partially disagree with that statement. Here in GA we hold our workshops for about 16 teams now for 10 weeks. We started off absorbing the cost into the team budget and came to the point this year where that was not going to cut it.

I'm glad to say that they workshops are still free and a whole lot better thanks to the additional sponsors that we obtained specifically to fund the workshops.

I'm not saying that there is something wrong with charging, just that if you can get a company or two to foot the bill its worth it.

[David Kelly]

i think charging is the exact opposite thing that should be done. There should not be a burden on teams with other costs and fees. Fund-raising is already hard enough getting the money they can. People are not going to want to get into an organization that they have to pay to participate. Thats why i think that MassFIRST or in our case IndianaFIRST should be totally separate and not supported by any individual team. It should share no costs or have to be supported, financially, by those teams.

[Jeremy Roberts]

Originally posted by David Kelly
i think charging is the exact opposite thing that should be done. There should not be a burden on teams with other costs and fees. Fund-raising is already hard enough getting the money they can. People are not going to want to get into an organization that they have to pay to participate. Thats why i think that MassFIRST or in our case IndianaFIRST should be totally separate and not supported by any individual team. It should share no costs or have to be supported, financially, by those teams.

I completely agree. I just wanted to say that in my previous post when I mentioned absorbing the cost into the team budget I was speaking not of the high school team, but of the organization we have going through Tech (GT FIRST) very similar to IndianaFIRST and the proposed MassFIRST.