The Ridge September 28-29

The proposal requires a half day of helping out, per year, which can be done with any member club doesn't have to be your own, to be eligible to renew a senior license and keep your senior number.

A half of a day, once a year.

Logistics could be as simple as a fill in the blank document that's signed off by any club official and sent in with your license renewal.

Possibilities, doesn't have to be AT the race track, but can be;

-help with annual banquet planning, coordination, setup, etc etc...
-help set up and tear down the course
-help with a BBQ
-help at registration or tech
-edit club membership lists
-help with paddock parking
-help with whatever

It's probably not the amount of time, so much as the principle of setting limits (min or max). As I said it's important to 'sell' the opportunity of lending a hand without any expectations to perform in an environment that may be uncomfortable. Fun factor is important. The challenge is important. I don't think that some drivers think that they can do whatever it is they think about how some of these specialties perform. I've been feeling out of place when I have an opportunity to pass a race car instead of so many times the reverse was true. But I'm adapting. And with more practice, I'll even see the flags I've waived before. When I can work it into my schedule and budget.

Next best seat in the house, you ought to come out there and see what the rest of us get to write down on paper. Find out what really peeves pre-grid people. Are you good with file manipulations? Getting a grasp of T&S is a serious challenge, but I'd bet some 14-18 year olds could 'get it' if they simply spent some time with it over the course of two or three seasons... or less. There are resources still bottled up within the existing membership.

Sometimes they just need to be put in their place... when they find it.

Drivers ain't driving all the time. Accolades to those that find the time to practice their proficiency at our race crafts whenever and wherever they've been able to. They are the future Race Chair volunteers and Steward volunteers because they've got more than wheel sawing experience with Race Operations.

It's important for our clubs to maintain a high level of self-suffiency in every aspect of Race Operations. Every service that is purchased from a vendor is money that will have to come out of entry $$. A particular balance that shouldn't be ignored for ease of solutions.

BTW, a primary reason that pro-event promoters would budget to pay marshals is when it becomes a mandate, or part of the service contract of a privately owned and/or operated race track. When allowed to use the volunteers of licensed SCCA/FIA marshals... well it's pretty much a no brainer. Would you like to see the emails from COTA for the F1 and the Houston GP and such? You don't grow qualified marshals from any old temp service. Marshals are bred right here at our race tracks. Every race weekend. It's just that some have more weekends in some areas than others.

I really don't want some, "I'm only doing this because the rules say I have to." bringing the team down. Chances are slim that wouldn't happen, not on my station anyway, but I'm just sayin'.

Make it a point to take up a position for a race weekend that you've never experienced before. Do that at least once a season and no one can ever say that the only thing you know is how to drive a car fast without hitting things. ;-)

Randy Blaylock said:

One can, however, mandate that a person perform certain requirements as a prerequisite to maintain a given credential that entitles them to certain privileges within a group.

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Devil's advocate in me says:

Racers don't have to do any of that with SCCA or NASA. We have to consider how these "requirements" will be perceived from people thinking about joining Conference instead of our competitors. If implemented incorrectly, a "mandatory" anything regarding work can put us at a disadvantage in perception in our marketplace. If we are mandating anything that's perceived as undesirable by racers then we would have to offer justification for someone to race with us instead of "them". The "them" being whomever doesn't require the perceived undesirable.

I keep using the word perception because that's really what's at stake. Conceptually this seems near sighted in it's solution and the risk to the perception of Conference as a place to race vs "them" is put at great risk if done incorrectly. I just question if the juice is worth the squeeze.

Randy Blaylock said:

A half of a day, once a year.

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At this stage in the discussion the amount of work in question is irrelevant. It's the mandate itself that poses the risk.

I wonder how the requirements of Conference's novice program affect people's choices vs. other sanctions. There are at least 6 and sometimes as much as 8 half day work prerequisites to advancing to an Area license in the Novice program. These are designed to get (force?) new people out to meet (and appreciate?) people in the various disciplines as much as or more than they are to supplement staffing.

Given this context, I guess I'm pretty disappointed that asking senior drivers to give back maybe 6 hours out of 8760 available during the year has the potential of all of these doomsday hypotheticals, I thought Conference was more than just some place to pay an entry fee and race to most.

There is nothing that precludes any member club from mandating volunteering as a requirement for membership, and by default licensing.

As such there is no reason to even propose this rules change.

Except that the proposal doesn't restrict volunteering to one's own club.

CSCC has a nice 'points earned' program that they track for each members participation through the year and at their banquet ,rewards are given. That's a pretty satisfying recognition, but it has no pre-determined expectation. It may not be a strong motivation, but it has it's positive affects.

Comparing the pre-requisites designed into a cirriculum of a structured training process at the novice to rookie levels is a bit of a reach really. Those folks without much training or experience in racing at all will recognize the need and more appreciate the aspects of pulling the whole picture of the operations together.

Perhaps a seque into more training opportunities as the Novice graduate to Area (Rookie) and Senior (Know it all) licenses might be more palitable to active participants if they were to become, or at least presented as something more along the lines of continuing education. Because really, if you're not learning something new every day, then what's the point?

Eventually we could have so many over-educated race officials on both sides of the fence that rule changes and club politics would become second nature.

Lol Randy it is not volunteering......

Just write it up to allow mandatory volunteering for any club to fulfill your membership requirements. See how it works at the club level before suggesting a fundamental change to ICSCC.

Randy Blaylock said:

Given this context, I guess I'm pretty disappointed that asking senior drivers to give back maybe 6 hours out of 8760 available during the year has the potential of all of these doomsday hypotheticals.

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So fine, let's ASK them then. Mandatory volunteerism is not asking.

Randy Blaylock said:

I thought Conference was more than just some place to pay an entry fee and race to most.

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What are you really trying to say with this?

I give.

Me too. Thanks for trying Randy and IRDC. Really depressing to see how this whole attempt to find a way to encourage help where it's needed has turned into a stupid pissing contest.

The attitude of entitlement has completely put me off, and I'm done with Conference for this year at least. The Ridge has a "boatload" of workers so you don't need this one. I'll take the time over the winter to decide if I want to continue to give my spare time to this sport. Good luck with getting those "volunteers" you so glibly expect to show up year after year ... tell me how that's working for you in a few years' time ... or maybe even next year.

I think Bonnie and Randy are both missing some key points here (and Rick, too), that I hope they take the time to read and consider:

1. Do we, as ICSCC, need more volunteers in all kinds of positions (not all at that track) to help with our events? Absolutely.

2. Is our current pool of volunteers not only shrinking, but running the risk of getting overwhelmed? Most definitely.

However:

1. Every one of us has different perceptions of our availability to do things that require our time, and most especially time away from other things we could/should be doing, and we should all be careful not project our own expectations of "what's not much work" onto others.

2. As soon as you take an activity that people engage in because it's "fun" and turn any aspect of that into "work," you run the risk of turning people away.

3. As soon as you "force" people to "work" at an activity that they do for fun, you run the risk of turning people away.

So:

As Colin says, it's really all about perception, and presenting what we "require" (or ask) of our drivers in the best possible light is really important. We can't lose sight of the fact that there are (or would be, if the rule change passes) organizations where people can race and ONLY race, so we need to be sure to present this requirement in a way that DOESN'T make it seem like an onerous task. Randy doesn't see an issue because the time involved is so very minor. He's right, but, again, perception is important: Either we make it as painless as possible for drivers to put in a small amount of time/effort or we make the value proposition one that makes it difficult NOT to do.

Bonnie, I would also suggest you remember that there is only a small group of people here expressing opinions and speculating. Any good discussion should start with an expression of "why this new thing sucks" so that the people proposing it can fix those problems, or at least know where their arguments for the proposal needs to lie. There has been no pissing contest here at all, nor should you be taking the attitude that this is "over" and that Randy/IRDC have "failed" to change something: Nothing's over yet because the Conference-wide rules vote hasn't happened yet.

The biggest risk with this rule change, in my view, is that it DOES pass: Ironically enough, the group of people who attend their club meetings to vote on rule changes is likely to be primarily made up of the same people that already DO volunteer for their respective clubs, and therefore more likely to approve a change like this. If that group passes a rule that impacts EVERY driver in Conference in a way that tells them how their time (even a small amount of it) away from racing is going to be spent, the MESSAGE is maybe more important the rule change itself, or we DO risk losing drivers to other organizations.

The reason IRDC unanimously passed this proposal was to illicit discussion. I think we have accomplished that goal. I think it is a serious problem that each club probably faces.

IRDC has about 260 members. At the rule proposal/vote meeting we had 25 people in attendance. Big turnout, we usually have 10-12 at our regular meetings. Roughly 10% of the people care enough to get involved in rule changes, 5% in the day to day decisions of running the club and races. 1%, organize, make the race decisions, work their asses off and make sure you have races each year. Rick's little red hen comparison could not be more appropriate! I certainly don't know what the answer is but perhaps we need to build incentives rather then make it mandatory. I think as Greg mentioned, the club level may be the right track. Remember IRDC bucks, there was even a proposal that went no where about allowing drivers reduced entry fees if they worked a complete race week end. We are not talking about our turn marshal volunteers although we are not with out problems in that area, we are mainly talking about the 1% who need help administering and putting on the races. I am not sure the drivers understand exactly what the club needs are in terms of help due to none participation in club decisions. This problem is not going away and I have confidence that we can find a solution.

I feel like an idiot. All those volunteer hours wasted, when the correct answer was there in front of me: if I'm at the track I'm racing and if I'm not at the track it's because I don't have time. So simple. So elegant. Where do I sign up?
:tongue:

Bonnie,
I don't think you got the right impression from the likes of myself, Colin, etc. We are not saying the nothing should happen. We just don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot while trying to make things better.

Dick's suggestion of giving INCENTIVES-- race entry fee reduction for volunteer hours worked sounds like a great way of getting people to see volunteering in a positive light.

Also, it seems like getting more assistants to help the stewards has bee a great way of lightening the steward's load and getting more people involved. Create assistant positions--they sound less scary than taking on the main position and allow people to "get their feet wet" before "jumping into the deep end."

Actually Bob it is that simple for the majority of our racers. Not because they are bunch of selfish, freeloading, prima donnas, as has been suggested by some, that could all benefit from enforced volunteering, but because they simply do not think about it. Or convenient opportunities to volunteer do not present themselves. Or they just have not been asked. On top of that some of the higher profile positions do take a lot of time. And of course organizing convenient ways to volunteer and asking members to fill them is just one more thing to do.......

I'm sorry for sounding pissy myself. It was the end of a long day, and the thread had begun to sound to me like ... "I'm not going to help out and you can't make me". I think what's being missed here is the fact that those of us who DO volunteer ALSO have much better things to do with our time, but we do this for the love of the sport. Anyway, I'm having a busy day here, so will just follow with interest the continued discussion. My apologies for my petulance!

Karen

NWMS created 2 assistant race chair positions this year and it worked very well. We have also rewarded a number of our volunteers with discounted, or comped races, schools, or test and tune days. We also considered discounted race entries for drivers who provide a race weekend volunteer.

No need to be sorry Bonnie.....since most of us posting on this thread also volunteer a fair amount of our time I think we have all felt exactly those feelings from time to time.

Bonnie said:

those of us who DO volunteer ALSO have much better things to do with our time, but we do this for the love of the sport.

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And that leads back to a point I was trying to illustrate earlier in this thread, which was that I imagine a lot of our volunteer base who work (specifically) the track/pre-grid originally started because they didn't have the interest/budget/whatever to race, but wanted to satisfy a craving for racing action they couldn't get elsewhere. With such easy access to so many types of auto racing these days, be it from the comfort of your couch or wherever your smartphone happens to be, we have a much harder time drawing in new people who AREN'T there to race but want to be "close to the action."

Whether that's an accurate assessment or not, it seems clear that our on-track workers are either going to need to come from within the sport itself (but by what mechanism? See earlier "time" discussion...) or be brought in through some incentive that isn't simply "for the love of the sport" (i.e., payment). Whether that latter solution means that our current worker base stops being made up of volunteers and forms the core of a new, "semi-professional" group of trained workers, I don't know, but I do most definitely disagree that it fundamentally changes the dynamic of Conference in this regard, turning the whole thing into a "manager/employee" relationship and ruining some fundamental aspect of ICSCC.

Finding new/additional bodies for all the myriad other volunteer positions that are necessary to run a race (or track event, or even the clubs themselves) is perhaps another conversation, as this issue, at least, seems like something more easily solved through driver-based volunteer time.