Planning the SR2015 Competition

[Peter Law]

Hi,

With Kickstart behind us, the next major event is the Competition.

I'm sure that all will agree that (for the most part) last year's
competition felt well organised mostly due to the large number of trac
tickets which were processed in advance. With that in mind, I heartily
suggest that we do the same this year.

While not a blocker for other things, team leaders (among others) are
going to start asking when the competition will be, and having a date
to work to makes it easier to plan things.

So, when shall we have the competition?

Useful information which I don't have, but hopefully others can pump
into this thread:
* What are the Easter holiday dates of Unis and schools for 2015?
** Easter weekend is the 4th & 5th April
* Do we have any thoughts on a venue yet?
** this might want to be a separate thread

I've a separate plan for a way to re-use most of the tickets from last
year, which should reduce the burden of creating them [1]. More on
that in another thread at some point.

It would be good to get this information out sooner than later to
avoid teams ending up with prior commitments on the date we choose.

Thanks,
Peter

[1] That's not to say that tickets shouldn't be raised -- please do
add things as you find them, but a large manual effort to create the
entire tree at this point would be overkill.

[Alistair Lynn]

Hi Peter–

One major factor for competition dates is when the venue is available.
The venue has not yet been decided as far as I know.

Alistair

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[Harry Cutts]

Hi Peter,

On Tuesday, 4 November 2014 20:53:01 UTC, PeterJCLaw wrote:

* What are the Easter holiday dates of Unis and schools for 2015?
** Easter weekend is the 4th & 5th April

According to the calendar [0], the University of Southampton's Easter vacation is from 22nd March until 19th April.

Harry Cutts

[0] http://www.calendar.soton.ac.uk/semesters.html

[Andy Busse]

And most school holidays seem to be 27th march - 13th April.

Andy

--

[Lila Fisch]

Hi,

this is now an urgent matter:
the competition is ca. 3 months away,

Munich students and blueshirts need to start booking flights.
From what I know all schools will soon need to

know the date of the competition
so if necessary they can go through the formalities involved
in school trips.

This is why I inquired further with sam yesterday and today. I find the results quite shocking [0]. Basically we don't even know yet when the racecourses will be available. Last year we had placed a hold in November

and right now Sam is waiting for information from Rob before he will inquire about that.

Things that can be done, mentioned in the conversation [0]:

- find where the list of possible venues is (possibly on the mailing list?)

- add this information to trac, #2679

- check the milestone for the competition on what can be done already and ask sam if you can do it. Thanks to the scripts for generating tickets this is quite well filled with tasks

- 'additional locations are always welcome', cheap locations that we can reserve for free might be useful right now

cheers
lilafisch

[0]:

(note: my IRC times are still German and I took the liberty to shorten some bits)

22:59 < lilafisch> samphippen: is there any information on the competition/locaiton yet?
22:59 < samphippen> it is extremely unlikely we'll know in the next week
23:00 < lilafisch> when can we know
23:00 < lilafisch> and what pieces are missing for this
23:01 < lilafisch> trac is not very verbose on the topic as far as I can tell.
23:01 < lilafisch> #2679
23:11 < samphippen> lilafisch: I need to talk to rob about about budgets and some other stuff. I've just sent him an email. Obviously, if we go with newbury again the situation can get turned around quickly.
23:11 < samphippen> otherwise it will be more slow
23:12 < samphippen> *slower*
23:12 < lilafisch> so there is nothing that can be done to speed this up, and there is absolutely no estimate when this will be clear.
23:14 < samphippen> lilafisch: right now it's not clear to me what we need to do for our venue stuff, I'm talking to rob to make it clear what's in the sponsorship pipeline so I know what we can afford.
23:20 < samphippen> we've got the list of venues from last year
23:25 < andybusse> any other way we can help?
23:26 < samphippen> frankly, as soon as we've got the venue selected I'd like to delegate nearly all the ordering of things
23:27 < PeterJCLaw> can any of the ordering of things be done in advance?
23:27 < samphippen> I'm not sure
23:27 < samphippen> last year
23:27 < samphippen> we rented lots of things
23:27 < samphippen> on specific date ranges
23:27 < samphippen> most of the comp tree on trac is well arranged
23:27 < samphippen> please pick something off
23:27 < samphippen> and ask me if you can do it
23:31 < samphippen> like last year though, I suspect it'll all start falling into place once the venue is picked
23:33 < PeterJCLaw> samphippen: you say you have a list of venues which have been considered in the past. is that documented somewhere, or is it just in someone's head? If the latter, it would be good to document it somewhere. If the former, it would be good to link to it from #2679
23:33 < samphippen> it's on the mailing listiirc

....
14:22 < lilafisch> samphippen: when are the racecourses available?
14:22 < lilafisch> can we at least narrow it down to a few weekends
14:23 < samphippen> lilafisch: I haven't checked since last night, I'm working
14:23 < lilafisch> so until now you haven't asked them what weekends they are free in april?
14:23 < samphippen> that is correct
14:24 < lilafisch> why? would finding that out already need budget?
14:25 < samphippen> I just haven't done it, there isn't a particular reason
14:26 < samphippen> we didn't ask them about dates
14:26 < samphippen> until we'd decided they were the venue
14:26 < samphippen> last year though
14:28 < lilafisch> rob placed a hold on newbury in November.
14:28 < lilafisch> 2013.
14:28 < samphippen> yes, we'd decided at that point
14:28 < samphippen> we're a fair bit behind last year, mostly because lots of attention was put on the charity situation
14:30 < lilafisch> can you get the availability dates soon
14:30 < samphippen> I've emailed rob, I've suggested newbury, I'll put that process in motion as soon as I hear back
14:31 < lilafisch> sure it can't hurt to ask them immediately
14:31 -!- samphippen [~tex...@37.157.33.76] has quit [Quit: Textual IRC Client: www.textualapp.com]

[Alistair Lynn]

Hi all–

> - 'additional locations are always welcome', cheap locations that we can
> reserve for free might be useful right now

Not to sound like a broken record since I seem to end up saying this
every year, but it does appear that the SUSU might have sufficient
space if we can take at least of the Bridge, the Café and/or Piazza.
More research necessary there though.

The Jubilee Sports Hall may also be big enough, although the acoustics
make that quite undesirable.

Alistair

[Sam Phippen]

Hi All,

Rob’s going to call Newbury tomorrow to check their availability, and that’s
definitely going to be our first choice (because we’ve already run a competition
of this scale at their and it *mostly* worked)

Thanks
—
Sam Phippen

[Lila Fisch]

Hi,

Rob’s going to call Newbury tomorrow to check their availability,

This is now yesterday - what are possible competition dates?

 

cheers
lilafisch

[Sam Phippen]

On 16 Jan 2015, at 09:47, Lila Fisch <lila...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Rob’s going to call Newbury tomorrow to check their availability,

This is now yesterday - what are possible competition dates?

Hi Lilafisch,

it’s a bit more complicated than that, Rob has to deal with various Newbury

internal shenanigans, but this is now in progress and we will know soon.

Thanks

—

Sam Phippen

[Laurenz]

Hey,

Several teachers and students approached me on our Munich techday yesterday. They urged me to ask about the competition date and time again, because they need to book flights and accomodation asap.

Should choosing the venue take longer, we still might be able to fix the date? The Munich folks will probably travel via London anyways.

Cheers

Laurenz

[Lila Fisch]

Hi,

thanks for the update Sam.

Sam wrote:

it’s a bit more complicated than that, Rob has to deal with various Newbury

internal shenanigans, but this is now in progress and we will know soon.

I find it a bit hard to understand what 'shenanigans' can make it so hard
to read a calendar and tell which weekends are still available.

**How long are we giving them to sort this out?**

From the racing plan, the usual last weekend of Easter is already blocked.
Anything before this will probably lead to many students being absent due to Easter plans;

going too late will get students into trouble with exams.

So to me the most reasonable dates are the two weekends directly after the holidays.

Me and other local blueshirts will start investigating SUSU/University facilities tomorrow.

This might not be a preferred option, but we need an immediate affordable solution

if budget or timing doesn't allow the Newbury Racecourse.

Once we know when Newbury is available,
I'd like to book a cheaper facility here at the same time, just until we have cleared that the finance will work [1].

Again, this is not a solution I'd want to go with but I would like to be able to announce the

competition date as soon as possible, even if the location is not 100% decided yet.

cheers
lilafisch

[1] At least as far as I understand finance is still unclear as well, robs budget plans have last been
updated in september, any details on that would be appreciated.

[Andy Busse]

Hi folks,

On 14/01/2015 16:53, Alistair Lynn wrote:
> Not to sound like a broken record since I seem to end up saying this
> every year, but it does appear that the SUSU might have sufficient
> space if we can take at least of the Bridge, the Café and/or Piazza.
> More research necessary there though.

While not wishing to steal anyone's thunder (I know that a bunch of
Southampton based folks have been working rather hard on this option),
it's important to give a quick status update now that there's some idea
of what a SUSU based competition would cost, and look like.

Southampton-based folks, please feel free to jump in with more detail
when available. I recommend further discussion about the details of this
(and other) options go into a separate thread, with a [sr2015-venue] tag.

Tyler's looked at a budget taking into account worst-case (i.e. upper
bound) costs of running a competition in SUSU, and a couple of us have
sanity checked it. Currently, this assumes that we take over SUSU as per
SR2013, with the second arena in the concourse, but we get additional
space in the Bridge, the Cafe, and possibly Piazz@. Other areas are
still being looked at. I don't know whether the draft budget is
publically viewable yet.

A competition based in SUSU would likely cost max. £12.5k
(pessimistically, maybe a few thousand more if other locations become
available). (For reference, a competition based in Newbury currently has
a budget of just over £34k). Put another way, that's £232/team vs.
£630/team (assuming no dropouts).

Thanks,
Andy

[Lila Fisch]

Since it relates best to this thread:

I just heard back from hospitality. Sadly they already have a booking on the 25th/26th so we can't book that as an emergency solution. This means we can't announce the competition date yet, since we have not found an alternative for that date, should Newbury not work out.

Cheers

lilafisch

[Peter Law]

lilafisch wrote:
> I just heard back from hospitality. Sadly they already have a booking on the
> 25th/26th so we can't book that as an emergency solution. This means we
> can't announce the competition date yet, since we have not found an
> alternative for that date, should Newbury not work out.

Do we know if they are available on any other dates? If we're looking
to collect as many options as possible, this would be useful
information.

P

[Rob Spanton]

Sam wrote:
> it’s a bit more complicated than that, Rob has to deal with various
> Newbury internal shenanigans, but this is now in progress and we will
> know soon.

Lilafisch:

> I find it a bit hard to understand what 'shenanigans' can make it so
> hard to read a calendar and tell which weekends are still available.

If that was all that they were doing when we were trying to place a hold
on the venue, it would be worrying.

Thanks,

Rob

[Peter Law]

Hi,

lilafisch wrote:
>> I find it a bit hard to understand what 'shenanigans' can make it so
>> hard to read a calendar and tell which weekends are still available.

Rob wrote:
> If that was all that they were doing when we were trying to place a hold
> on the venue, it would be worrying.

I'd originally assumed that 'shenanigans' merely referred to the venue
having some internal bureaucracy which was generally felt as being
overly arduous. Your reply suggests this isn't the case, making the
original choice of wording odd.

Since I (along I'm sure with most of the rest of our volunteers) have
never been in direct contact with either this venue, nor booked a
major event like this, and since you're suggesting some additional
knowledge of what sorts of thing they'd be doing, please could you
enlighten us? What sorts of things should we be making sure that
they're doing?

Thanks,
Peter

[Lila Fisch]

Hi,

so after sleeping over the revelations of the last days,
and leaving the sadness about the social component aside,
this is the situation I currently see us stuck in [1]:

A) Go with the fixed committee group
- (Ab)use Jeremy as bank
- Run competition in Newbury, as we did successfully last year (based on the assumption that the tasks listed by Sam can all be done successfully, which I believe is probable)
- Budget for Kickstart (Microgames, Mech kits) will be very close to zero (accurate numbers depend on $ to GBP rate and detailed spendings)
- The next chance for Motorola money arriving (that will not be used for paying the sr2015 competition) is probably AFTER the sr2016 competition

B) Don't go with the fixed committee group
- Have no liquidity, therefore be unable to run the competition in Newbury
- Only choice is the competition in SUSU with less space (based on the assumption we can get the tech support from SUSU and a floorplan with 54 teams)
- Possibly not have a second arena (this still needs checking with the people responsible for fire safety)
- Get the funding from Motorola after the comptition, use it to start into sr2016 with a budget

Additionally this situation leaves us further stalled on announcing the Competition date.

Anything I overlooked?

Cheers
lilafisch

[1] assuming that no money falls from the sky somewhere, no sudden sponsor can be found etc. We might be lucky with ECS

[Peter Law]

Hi,

lilafisch wrote:
> this is the situation I currently see us stuck in [1]:
> A) Go with the fixed committee group

> B) Don't go with the fixed committee group

I'd like to point out that while the SC have typically directly
handled the running of the competition, it is by definition [1] a
non-executive role whose purpose is for guidance and ensuring that
things happen.

While this is contrary to the previous reality, I don't see any reason
for the previous pattern to be enforced and believe that a SC could be
just that, delegating much of the work elsewhere.

Thus it seems reasonable that if there are enough people (SC overlap
or otherwise) who want to get something done, that they should be able
to go ahead and do that, as long as they can agree with the SC:
- any resources they need/commitments they'll make (etc.)
- a suitable level of feedback in regards progress, contingencies (etc.)

I'm therefore curious why everyone is acting like SC are the only ones
who can do anything.

Thanks,
Peter

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Committee2#Structure

[Peter Law]

Hi,

I wrote:
> I'm therefore curious why everyone is acting like SC are the only ones
> who can do anything.

Apologies, it appears I shouldn't send emails at 1am. I'd not meant to
imply that no-one else was doing anything.

Peter

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 27/01/15 14:36, Lila Fisch wrote:
> A) Go with the fixed committee group
> - (Ab)use Jeremy as bank

It's only abuse if it's unwilling. I'm immensely happy that I've been
able to make the competition better over the years by stretching ends
til they meet, and I'd consider anything less to be hiding my talent [0].

> - Run competition in Newbury, as we did successfully last year (based on
> the assumption that the tasks listed by Sam can all be done successfully,
> which I believe is probable)
> - Budget for Kickstart (Microgames, Mech kits) will be very close to zero
> (accurate numbers depend on $ to GBP rate and detailed spendings)

As far as I'm aware it was less than a grand this year anyway, so is
essentially fiddly small change.

> - The next chance for Motorola money arriving (that will not be used for
> paying the sr2015 competition) is probably AFTER the sr2016 competition

I estimate it takes six weeks for money to arrive from Motorola if it
goes straight to a charity (one week paperwork, four weeks while the
cheque crosses the Atlantic for some reason, and another week to
actually cash it). All past delays tend to have been injected by SUSU.
Feb 2016 is a likely time for future funding to actually arrive.

The funding for this year has recently been approved, see an email of
mine in a moment.

> [Stuff]

> - Get the funding from Motorola after the comptition, use it to start into
> sr2016 with a budget

I think this statement is based on the assumption that we've ever had
enough money in an account at the start of the year, before the
competition, to cover the competition. That might have been the case in
2007, but it never has been since. This is just the way things are, and
real businesses similarly have financial instruments (like bonded
warehouses) to actually make their finances plannable.

> [1] assuming that no money falls from the sky somewhere, no sudden sponsor
> can be found etc. We might be lucky with ECS

On the longer (i.e. not the next 3 months) term there are numerous doors
that are only openable by charities. There are one or two I can name
who've asked if SR is a charity in the past then disappeared when the
answer was 'no'.

[0]
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25:14-30&version=ESV

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Lila Fisch]

Hi,

based on Jeremy's notes and other conversation here an update to my situation analysis.

I think all of us agree with the goal of becoming a charity, however I am assuming the worst case that for the sr2016 competition the whole process of becoming a charity and receiving additional funding will not fully have gone through.

I am trying to keep this as neutral as I can.

As the current election stands, we have a closed group that is running with a clearly defined goal for this year's competition:

Repeat the quality and impressive set up of last year's competition. This group includes Jeremy, who has been acting as our bank for most of SR history. However based on Jeremy's statements I assume that he is not willing to act as bank if not elected, and that after stepping back this summer he would also not act as bank anymore.

The funding left after the competition is likely to suffice for repeating this years Kickstart for SR2016, there is a chance that Motorola funding for the SR2016 competition will arrive before the competition, giving us liquidity. Otherwise we would have to find a way to get loans without Jeremy being available.

If that closed group is not elected, we are left with the other applicants for the roles. There might be options like getting a loan from a bank or ECS, but it is unlikely that we can get a sum that is sufficient for Newbury. Without the needed liquidity, repeating the last competition is impossible. I then see no choice but to use SUSU, that I initially only looked at as a back up in case something did not work out with Newbury. We can run a good competition there, though not as impressive as Newbury. Since the cost is about 1/3, a good portion of the budget would not be needed. Uses for this could be improving Kickstart, we could pay for a much earlier venue booking and announce the competition date at the start of the SR year.

I don't like the either-or state of this, but I don't know how to change this.

I'd also like to point out that a status quo is that and no more. We should try to never make it worse and ask ourselves if we can improve it, not hold on to it.

Cheers

lilafisch

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 01/02/15 14:53, Lila Fisch wrote:
> As the current election stands, we have a closed group that is running with
> a clearly defined goal for this year's competition:
> Repeat the quality and impressive set up of last year's competition. This
> group includes Jeremy, who has been acting as our bank for most of SR
> history. However based on Jeremy's statements I assume that he is not
> willing to act as bank if not elected, and that after stepping back this
> summer he would also not act as bank anymore.

I think the liquidity bit has now been over-sold: in the immediate
future my concern is the ~£5k deposit that Newbury want ~immediately.
Last year we received the moto money before the competition, for example.

> The funding left after the competition is likely to suffice for repeating
> this years Kickstart for SR2016

For reference if we were to continue running this competition
indefinitely and the funding gap was something in the order of a grand,
and the future didn't involve lots of pain, I would say it was eminently
achievable and I'd probably donate some of the gap.

> there is a chance that Motorola funding
> for the SR2016 competition will arrive before the competition, giving us
> liquidity. Otherwise we would have to find a way to get loans without
> Jeremy being available.

Incorporated things can take out loans in the name of the corporation,
if the bank think it's a sufficiently robust organization.

[stuff]

> I don't like the either-or state of this, but I don't know how to change
> this.

The crux of the matter is having enough float to pay the deposit on a
site in advance, and what might be a small structural deficit. These
things are not insurmountable. Baked into all of it is the assumption
that Moto will continue funding SR which also isn't something we can
control anyway.

Doing anything this significant always has a necessary level of
uncertainty about the future and sustainability, unless you're
Smallpeice who have £13m in the bank and charge students for attendance.
That's sustainable, but I don't think anyone here believes either are
options for SR.

> I'd also like to point out that a status quo is that and no more. We should
> try to never make it worse and ask ourselves if we can improve it, not hold
> on to it.

For reference, my motivation for bailing is that I don't see either the
current organizational structure or any of those proposed by other
people as having a future; or if they did a future I'd want to be part of.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Lila Fisch]

Hi,

I think the liquidity bit has now been over-sold: in the immediate
future my concern is the ~£5k deposit that Newbury want ~immediately.
Last year we received the moto money before the competition, for example.

My impression from previous mails was that this can't be expected and last year was more an exception. I was assuming we had to cover most of the competition cost before the money arrives. This statement makes me a lot more optimistic.
 

The crux of the matter is having enough float to pay the deposit on a
site in advance, and what might be a small structural deficit. These
things are not insurmountable. Baked into all of it is the assumption
that Moto will continue funding SR which also isn't something we can
control anyway.

Doing anything this significant always has a necessary level of
uncertainty about the future and sustainability, unless you're
Smallpeice who have £13m in the bank and charge students for attendance.
That's sustainable, but I don't think anyone here believes either are
options for SR.

Just having a large part of the funding at the start of the year could be an improvement, which could be achieved by running one cheaper competition now, shifting our funding cycle to getting funds for the coming up year. At Kickstart we would then have the security that we have the most basic funds needed for running the competition that we are promising to competitors and we could announce a date [1].

However, at the moment the most important point is that we need to announce a competition date really soon, so I'm just glad to know we can run with both, whatever happens.

Southampton:

I will hear back from fire safety for SUSU by Monday, the major Tech problem is having enough power in the Cafe. I'll look into that on Wednesday.

Newbury:

Giorgos is working on finding tape, which looks like the biggest problem here. We have a positive answer from Motorola.

Sam: do you have an update/time line for Newbury?

Cheers

lilafisch

[1] and if something goes wrong we would know a few months before the competition, having half a year to panic etc.