Collaboration
Collaboration is relatively new to FIRST. Collaboration between teams where teams share ideas is encouraged by the FIRST ethos of Gracious Professionalism. Collaboration can range from teams sharing the design and fabrication of small parts within their robots to multiple teams building identical robots. Teams that collaborate have widely varying goals: some do it to save costs on fabrication, as building multiple identical parts is faster to do and less expensive for the teams involved than making their own separate parts. Some teams do it as part of their emphasis on spreading the influence of FIRST: Team 1114, already a successful and well-supported team, started two new teams (1503 and 1680) by helping them with their design and fundraising efforts.
Debate
Since 2004, collaboration on entire robots has ignited a debate in the FIRST community about whether it is fair. Critics of full-robot collaboration say that collaborators are exploiting a loophole in the FIRST rules in order to have one very large team that is allowed to field 3 of its robots simply because they have different team numbers, while competitors may only field a single robot. Critics continue that other teams that feel this way may become discouraged as collaborating teams with large resources enter 2 or 3 powerful robots, potentially bumping weaker teams out of elimination rounds or awards. In defense, supporters of collaboration point out that smaller teams may not have even existed if larger teams had not offered to support them with designs and expertise. Thus, they say, there is a net increase in the number of people being exposed to FIRST. Further, collaboration is contended to be more like the real engineering world where companies or divisions of companies share designs between themselves. The organizers of the FRC have indicated that they would like to encourage collaboration, so it appears that collaboration will be present in the FRC in the future.