There are so many community developed tools that FRC teams and fans use throughout the season to keep tabs on their favorite teams and events, way too many to list. Until now, developers of those tools have been forced to scrape webpages or Twitter feeds for the data. This is not the best way for us to make the needed data available to those developers, and we want to change it.

Developing an API to allow developers access to event data is one of our key goals for this season. But, we want to make sure we’re getting developers the data they need in the way they need it. So, we’re going to be hosting an FRC Community Tools Developers Conference. This conference will give the FRC staff members developing the API the chance to hear directly from the users to ensure it’s everything we want it to be.

The conference is tentatively scheduled for the week of September 15, using an online tool like GoToMeeting.

If you have developed a tool and want to be a part of the conference, please fill out this survey telling us your name, email address, and the community tool you’d like to use the API for. The survey also asks what time of day works best for you. Once we’ve collected names, we’ll nail down an exact day and time. We’ll also send out a follow-up survey to pre-collect questions to be answered during the event. Please fill out the participation survey by 9/5.