After yesterdays FRC blog post, a few people have mentioned that certain regionals will be heavily considering early pit setup as an option. So my question is what events are going to be trying to do this.
Hopefully we can get a collective list out of this thread.
We have our QCR Planning Committee regular meeting tonight and it is on the agenda to discuss. I doubt there would be a reason we wouldn’t do it. But we still have to vote on it.
Do regional planning committees often make decisions like this using a voting process rather than a process to reach consensus?
I think you will find almost as many procedures as they are committees. 
In reality they are providing recommendations to the corporation to be followed or not. If you have a strong personality running the committee it might be a leader/follower thing. Others might follow rigidly Roberts rules of order. I view consensus building to be a version of voting. Most volunteer committees I have been involved with have been a mixture. Corporate boards should be following the procedure laid out in their bylaws.
I can tell you that the MN RPC doesn’t use voting for much. Everyone on the committee has a different area of focus - Volunteer Cordinator, head ref, LRI, GOFIRST, social media, judge advisor, etc. As a result, most decisions involve only a couple of people - for example, I don’t have much input on how we handle judges or what we do for the VIP reception at the events, and I don’t really want it. I give serious input in the areas I am focused on.
For something like this, those not involved with load-in probably won’t have much of an opinion either way, while those responsible for load-in, volunteers, setting up the pits, ordering dinner for the volunteers, and working directly with the venue will have the strongest opinions and come to a decision after appropriate discussion.
Same with QCR, but we tend to discuss the big items as a group. But when I develop the event Handbook it is only myself and one or two others who review it before sending it out. The same for pit layouts, volunteer meal selection, etc.
Before registration opens up in the morning, does anyone have any additional info on which events are allowing early setup?
We have not decided yet. There were many pro’s and con’s for and against early setup so we have tabled the decision to our next meeting.
MN will not be offering early setup this year at any of our 4 events, but will be evaluating the experience at other venues to make a decision for future years later. We wanted to keep all events the same, and unfortunately there were some issues we just couldn’t get past in order to offer it this year. Among these issues was projected volunteer availability and cost. Not to mention the pits are below freezing during load-in with all the doors opens in Duluth!
One item that came up in our discussion was one I hadn’t considered before… A majority of teams end up travelling and getting a hotel for a couple of our events. Some (1/3 or more, we think) drive in Thursday morning instead of Wednesday evening, or only bring up a skeleton crew from the first day to cut down on costs. In this situation, you end up offering those teams that can afford that extra night in the hotel a perceived advantage of an extra hour or two Wednesday night spent setting up their pit that other teams may not be able to take advantage of. US be interested to hear thoughts from the community on that subject…