ARM and SR2015

[Rob Spanton]

Hey,

Some bad news everyone. ARM had some kind of internal budget
readjustment, which has caused the part of it that was going to give us
some things to be unable to give us those things.

The result of this is that we cannot expand to 81 teams. However, we
can afford to do the kit upgrade for 54 teams. This is the new plan
that the sr2015-kit branch on my gitorious budget now reflects. I will
be merging that very soon -- we're currently waiting on some quotes back
from some people on board manufacture, as there appear to be some issues
with that.

Obviously this isn't great, but rather than wallow in some kind of
misery, let's look on the bright sides:

* We don't have to manage a team expansion whilst also managing a
completely new kit situation.
* I have been put in touch with the CSR (Corporate Social
Responsibility) bit of ARM. This is good, as their aims are
considerably more in-line with ours than the bit I was
previously interacting with. However, this won't bear fruit for
many months to come.

Cheers,

Rob

[Olly Smith]

Having just read SRAWN, here's my honest reaction.

"Shit." 

That really sucks. I mean, really, really sucks. 

What are we going to do (discussion) to prevent this from happening again?

[Harry Cutts]

Hi,

On Thursday, 11 September 2014 20:46:11 UTC+1, Olly Smith wrote:

What are we going to do (discussion) to prevent this from happening again?

Rob wrote:

ARM had some kind of internal budget readjustment, which has caused the part of it that was going to give us some things to be unable to give us those things.

 

[...]

* I have been put in touch with the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) bit of ARM.  This is good, as their aims are considerably more in-line with ours than the bit I was previously interacting with.  However, this won't bear fruit for many months to come.

Considering those two points, it doesn't seem there's much we can do (except build a relationship with CSR), as it wasn't caused by anything we did/didn't do. My only suggestion here links in with the discussion on publicity [0]. If we emit more publicity, we can hopefully direct some of it (without too much modification) to our sponsors, to give them a better idea of what we're up to.

Personally, I think a pause in our rather high expansion rate is no bad thing. We were stretched almost to the limit at the competition this year, and running with 54 teams again should let us focus on improving what we already do (e.g. reducing Blueshirt stress levels).

Harry Cutts

[0] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/srobo/2DJJgpCf9yg/discussion