Back in autumn
2008, I was asked by the board (I will tell you what the board is in another
post) of Formula Student Germany, if I wanted to participate in developing
rules for an Electric FS class.
Some of my first
thoughts were: How could I make a difference as an Official? What was missing
in terms of information delivered about the reasoning behind ?
One of the answers
was/is: The structure and the work of the rules committee and also the organisational
structures/work of the Officials of the FS competitions always lacked
transparency for me.
The rules
committee (I will also write about that in the future) for example was a big
grey cloud and each released rules version made me often scratch my head and
think:
- What were they thinking
when they introduced this rule?
- How is a new rule created:
Are they just sitting together and one comes up with the idea of
clarifying the colour of the role bar padding and the other members simply
agree?
On the other hand
I also thought that there was a lack of people I could directly talk to about
issues with the rules, as well as event organisation in general and about the
reasoning and procedures behind decisions and processes. In my opinion it is way
easier to accept a decision, if the reasoning behind it was explained, meaning all
necessary information is provided or at least is available on request.
I decided to
become part of the "dark side", as I call the organisational part of
FS competitions, and joined the newly founded rules committee of FSG to develop
the very first version of the FSE rules. While working on the rules during 2008
and 2009, I strived to involve the teams in the development of the electric
rules and became more active in the FSAE and FSG forums.
I was also trying
to participate often in discussions about new rules, about event operations
etc. in order to shed more light on these parts and also to be a source of
background information. I think this works quite well, although it also leads
to funny moments from time to time when people approach me at an event and say:
"I know you from the FSAE forum!". In that case I think that I should
try to cut my activities back a bit and not post in every semi-interesting
thread. I remember that Michael Royce Sr. himself approached me at FS UK 2010
with the words: "There he is, the infamous Tobias Michaels."
Obviously he was reading my posts as well...
Back to topic: I
felt that the forum was good to get in direct contact with the teams and to
participate in related discussions, but from time to time I had small pieces of
information to share, which could be quite valuable for the teams. A forum
however is the wrong platform for this as these information pieces are usually
distributed in one-way, broadcast manner to reach as many teams as possible in
an easy way. So I joined twitter. My first tweet was created in July 2011, you
may read it here: TobiasMic's First Tweet (I still avoid using
Google+ and facebook by the way)
During the past two
years of using twitter, more and more situations occurred in which I deemed 140
characters to be insufficient for delivering the information I had to share. I
started to use Dropbox in order to distribute documents to the followers of my
twitter channel. However, this is rather inefficient and not easily accessible
later on.
So here I am with
a blog to push the transparency of the dark side even further. I will try to
post an entry to my blog every week or at least every other week, provided that
I have enough interesting content and also time to create a post. I will use
the blog to provide more detailed and comprehensive background information to
which only Officials have access. However, this also means that the provided
information will be sanitised from time to time to protect the IP of teams or internal
matters of the rules committee / event organisers for example.
I missed a minor cause about why I started to blog: I am one of these
arrogant smart asses on the Internets who think that others are really
interested in reading what they are writing :)
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