Message From the Chair – ORC 2024

Hello Everyone

I’d like to start by thanking everyone who attended this years event! Despite some challenges to get there, we believe the event as a whole was a success! A total of 27 teams and nearly 100 participants came out this year and showcases their skills across all of our events! We know that for many this has been months of work and we hope everyone had a great time!

In this recap, I’d like to open up the curtain a bit to this years organizing team and give some information on what happened this year, and what we are learning from this. First a quick introduction, My name is Robert, you may have seen me at the registration desk or running around. I am the Chair for ORC 2024 and this was my first ever time organizing ORC. I was given the role through IEEE in October of last year. I have been passionate about robotics since I went to University in 2016 where I helped run a University robotics team of my own, from design all the way to competition. I also have had experience running events of this scale and larger for nearly a decade from student council in high school to university hackathons. That being said, this year brought with it a lot of new challenges. I was supported by our wonderful returning competition leads Mark and Loïc as well as many of our returning day of volunteers and to them I give my thanks and admiration for all of their support.

This is all to say our team had a lot of new things to learn this year. For a majority of our team we needed to learn a lot of the event planning that previously was overseen by past organizers, many of which competed and volunteered in this event for many years. The challenges of this created many of the time delays in registration and some confusion in information before the event. This also made building a larger team challenging so our team was much smaller than in previous years. On the day of the event, some things including posting scheduling, a fast data entry system and overall handling of delays caused some challenges and later end time than expected. For those who this effected, we are sorry for any confusion or challenges that occurred with this.

We want to ensure everyone that we are learning from the mistakes of this year and I hope to use my experience of this year to make next year a better experience for everyone! Internally we have been taking June as a month of reflection and organization to make sure we learn everything we can from this years event as well as finishing some small leftovers from this years event. In the coming days we will be sending out feedback forms to this year’s participants which we hope you will consider filling out. This information is vital to us knowing what people like and what they want changed so we can build the best plan for next year. Over July and August, we will be building our ORC 2025 team, creating a roadmap for the year and hopefully working on some cool new initiatives for you all! A primary goal for next year will be a clearer timeline and communication of information to participants and we will be giving you information on that as soon as we can over this summer! If you are interested in joining next years team please keep an eye out for executive team registration in early July!

Once again thank you to the organizing team of 2024 for helping me run this event and for everyone who showed up!

– Robert, Chair ORC 2024