Kickstart announce email

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

So we promised to provide details on SR2015's Kickstart on the 1st of
August. After speaking to Sam, Southampton and Bristol kickstarts are a
definite, and a London based kickstart is starting to take shape. I'm
unaware of any other Kickstarts being arranged.

As a result, I propose the following email, to go out on the 1st to a)
the people who have signed up, and b) to people who took part last year,
in case they're going to sign up later (and still need to know the dates).

Note that I'm about to rewrite the Kickstart page to reflect it's new
format and timing.

~

Hi,

You've received this email because {you took part in SR2014, you've
signed up for the Student Robotics competition 2015}. We're now in a
position to confirm that the Kickstart event [0] for SR2015 will happen
on Saturday the 18th of October, 2014.

We expect to be able to support even more teams than ever this year,
thanks to the generosity of our sponsors. As a result, we'll be running
Kickstart events in three locations: Southampton, Bristol, and London.
For the first two, we'll be holding the event on the corresponding
Universities campus [1], and we're currently finalising the location of
the London Kickstart.

We'll be publishing details and directions about each Kickstart on our
website in the near future. When your place is confirmed in September,
please keep the Kickstart date free and arrange for the competitors
who'll be taking part to attend. (Please note that for all of our
events, you will need to provide/arrange adult supervision for
competitors yourself).

Don't worry if you're unable to make that date, attendance is not
mandatory, although you will need to arrange for the kit to be couriered
from us to you. We highly recommend attending Kickstart if at all
possible: it's the best opportunity to learn about the equipment that we
provide, and about the competition game this year.

We're all looking forwards to seeing you with a team at a Kickstart
event near you!

[0] https://www.studentrobotics.org/events/kickstart
[1] i.e., the University of Southampton and the University of Bristol

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Without objection I'll ship this tomorrow. It'd be nice if the following
three patches could receive peoples attention:

https://www.studentrobotics.org/gerrit/#/c/1609/
https://www.studentrobotics.org/gerrit/#/c/1610/
https://www.studentrobotics.org/gerrit/#/c/1611/

Which rewrite the Kickstart page, remove the key dates, and remove the
SR2014 dates from the front page, respectively.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Rob Spanton]

Hey Jeremy,

I would be inclined to tip this para on its head:

> Don't worry if you're unable to make that date, attendance is not
> mandatory, although you will need to arrange for the kit to be
> couriered from us to you. We highly recommend attending Kickstart if
> at all possible: it's the best opportunity to learn about the
> equipment that we provide, and about the competition game this year.

So that it's more like attending kickstart is the default, and not
attending it is the special case:

We highly recommend attending Kickstart: it's the best

opportunity to learn about the equipment that we provide, and

about the competition game this year. You can still compete if
you cannot attend Kickstart, but you will need to arrange for
the kit to be couriered to you.

Also, something should go in about us assigning kickstarts to teams,
rather than them assigning themselves kickstarts. (To avoid the
Southampton swamping situation).

Cheers,

Rob

[Murray Colpman]

> Also, something should go in about us assigning kickstarts to teams,
> rather than them assigning themselves kickstarts.  (To avoid the
> Southampton swamping situation).

Is this a good idea or would it just result in more teams not coming to kickstart if they can't make their assigned one (but could attend a different one)? Would pleading with schools to go to Bristol or London if they are able perhaps be more reasonable or is that likely to be too ineffective?

Murray.

[Peter Law]

Murray wrote:
> Is this a good idea or would it just result in more teams not coming to
> kickstart if they can't make their assigned one (but could attend a
> different one)? Would pleading with schools to go to Bristol or London if
> they are able perhaps be more reasonable or is that likely to be too
> ineffective?

We need to know where teams are going to be so that we have enough
kits to hand out at those locations.

I doubt that a team would decide not to go to a kickstart because we
told them which one to go to, and I'd hope that we could allow them to
change if there was a serious difficulty in getting to the one we'd
assigned. They'd just to ask..

Thanks,
Peter

[Rob Spanton]

Hey,

On Thu, 2014-07-31 at 20:13 +0100, Peter Law wrote:
> I doubt that a team would decide not to go to a kickstart because we
> told them which one to go to, and I'd hope that we could allow them to
> change if there was a serious difficulty in getting to the one we'd
> assigned. They'd just to ask..

Indeed. The number of teams at Southampton KS has to be reduced from
what it was last year. I think most teams will be absolutely fine with
having kickstarts allocated to them, and there will be a few who have
some quibbles that we will deal with on an individual basis.

Rob

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Thanks to those who reviewed patches; there's one more engrish fix [0].

I concur with Rob's paragraph-flipping suggestion earlier.

Inre assigning Kickstarts to teams, I agree that we should dictate who
goes where, as we will quickly reach scaling problems otherwise. How
about the following wording, to be appended to the second paragraph,

"To balance attendance across locations, we'll let you know which
Kickstart to go to".

[0] https://www.studentrobotics.org/gerrit/#/c/1612/

--
Thanks
Jeremy