Recently my team (3374) won the FIRST Impact Award at the Utah Regional, but we never picked up our Impact binder after winning the award (oops). We reached out to our Regional Director to see if she had any information, but sadly, she never located it.
Does anyone have any ideas of where our binder could be or how we could get our binder back before Worlds in April?
Maybe a silly question, but cant you just print a new one? Worlds is weeks away.
It has written letters that we can’t replicate. We’ll make a new one if needed, but we can’t use our documentation.
Welp, that’s a learning opportunity right there. For starters, think about infrastructure and policies to prevent that from happening again, something like “scan all handwritten documents, and upload them to the shared team google drive”, then go from there.
In most industries there’s a saying along the lines of “if it’s not in three places, it doesn’t exist”. Related; many biographies have a chapter titled “The Fire”. Store any valuable information in different places and on different mediums. Some companies even have a policy of keeping paper copies of contracts in addition to the original digital ones.
I’ve never judged FRC, but I did judge some FLL and FTC last year. We were directed to clearly communicate to any teams who left a binder or other paperwork that it would NOT be returned, but shredded after the event. This was definitely different than pre-pandemic. While it wasn’t explicitly said, the tone of the conversation hinted that there had been some team materials lifted by people not of those teams in recent years, leading to improper release of personally identifying information.
It may be worth connecting with the volunteer coordinator or judge advisor from the event to see if they happened to locate the binder, just in case.