[FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

FRC Designs is excited to announce that we have partnered with GameSense to take the website to the next level.

The partnership of FRC Designs and GameSense will allow all of our technical knowledge to be applied to the foundation of FRC Designs.

Over the last five years, FRC Designs has transformed from a simple idea to a resource for all FRC teams to use. FRC Designs is a database for FRC robot design ideas and solutions. This database consists of previous and current robot designs for the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). The database includes images, videos, and CAD of robot designs that are submitted by FRC teams. The goal of FRC Designs is to create a continuous improvement of competition among teams in future FRC competitions.

GameSense and I are working to make FRC Designs the go-to location for design inspiration and recognition in FRC. FRC Designs will remain its own entity, but the leadership and technical team will include me and members of GameSense. We have a ton of exciting ideas for the site, but in order to accomplish them we need your help.

Our first project is to bring you more quality content via the FRC Designs Blog. We’re looking for dedicated individuals that are interested in contributing to the blog. Blog entries will be focused on design, but can cover anything from pit design to robot design and everything in between.

If you’d like to be an FRC Designs contributor, please fill out this form so we can contact you:

FRC Designs Contributor Form

Matt

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

Matt,

Have you asked the Chief Delphi folks about building on the foundation they already created, instead of starting a separate site?

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

That's what he is doing no? The site already exists.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

He appears to creating a new site instead of collaborating with the CD folks to extend the CD site. To me, that seems to be a poor choice.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

The sites already exist independently, both independently of each other and independently of CD.

What they're doing is combining management, and starting a blog. Whether or not a forum-post format is what they really want is their decision.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

I understand. That doesn't change my opinion/advice.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

Not exactly sure how/why you think everything needs to be paired with CD, but to each his own I suppose.

Guess Blue alliance/Megaphone/At The Control/GameSense/top 25 etc etc... should have asked for permission to partner with CD? :confused: In my mind CD is just a discussion board. What GameSense and FRC designs do are very separate from Chief Delphi and almost have nothing to do with each other. I'm glad that we don't have some massive site/collab that is somehow linked to CD directly. More content, more sources, different type of content, and it's not all one jumbled mess.

Excited to see what comes out of this partnership! The GameSense crew does a really great job with their show and look forward to some new content that can help teams.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

If you have to ask, the answer isn't likely to impress you.

How many one true temples of FIRST ___ robotics knowledge do we need?

Your "one jumbled mess" is exactly what the proliferation of overlapping sites, each claiming to be the best repository of ___, creates.

I never said they all had to be part of CD. I did write that I think the people who get the urge to add something useful (I'll bet CD existed first), should start by collaborating with the infrastructure that already exists. My hunch is that the collaboration (if it was more than just lip service, and if both/all parties actually collaborate) would create a better and more easily navigated total.

Of course I might be wrong. Cooperation might be a bad thing, and other approaches might be the way to go.

Blake

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

You do realize that the vast majority of these sites started--in quite a few cases, years ago--by working with/on CD? Sometimes, a forum/discussion format just isn't the way to go!

FRCDesigns is a design repository: CAD and the like. CD doesn't do that nearly as well, even in CD-Media (which has quite a few renders, but detailed CAD doesn't fit very well). As I recall, it WAS discussed on CD when it started. There are quite a few other groups that are formed through CD, but work independently because they've got a different purpose for existing.

On another note: There was one infrastructure collaboration between CD and something else. I think FRCwiki is shut down--or at least not in active use--because people just didn't use it and spammers did.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

Eric, I understand what your saying, but also notice that it's possible stand what you wrote on it's head.

Creating a persistent, easy to find and navigate path between the sites sounds like something desirable. However, using a discussion thread is a lousy way to make a persistent path between the sites. As you say, sometimes a forum/discussion format (for an announcement intended to have a lasting effect) just isn't the way to go.

The sort of collaboration I'm suggesting might amount to nothing more than replacing the discussion-thread type of announcement the OP used (that will disappear in a matter of hours), with a persistent, well-labelled link on CD to the other site (and a link on the other site to CD).

The cooperation might turn into a formal division of responsibilities, it might not.

Right now, for me, announcements like the OP feel like a balkanization of information/resources. Perhaps I (and maybe others?) am given that impression because the announcement doesn't describe the FRCDesigns site as a part of a complete, bigger whole.

WIBNI each of the sites mentioned in this thread (CD, Gamesense, FRCDesigns, TBA ...), prominently mentioned each of the others, and their respective missions, on each site home page? I checked CD, Gamesense, and FRCDesigns. None of them do it.

I suppose I have used a curmudgeonly way of making my point, but regardless, I think it is a valid point.

Blake

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

BRANDON!!!! QUIT IT WITH THE VALUABLE STUFF!!! [/irate user][/sarcasm]

Used to be, there was just such a list on CD, left side of the portal, under CD-Media's papers box. Linked to all kinds of nice places: Team-in-a-Box, MOE's FYI, other sites of related organizations, you get the picture. Looks like it got removed in the last round of cleaning up. (Brandon... this is what happens when you "clean up" CD. People notice, and complain. First FAHA, now this.)

I do recall seeing some other sites doing something similar.

I see what you're saying: have a link bar, or something similar, to other sites that do the same sort of thing. That, I could sure get behind. Matter of fact... I suspect that if asked about, it could be done--there's a lot of space next to the CD-Media/CD-Spy buttons, so it might be possible to put a "other useful sites" button up there that would open a list of links.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

That's certainly a good idea but I think it kind of takes away from the point of their post. A couple weeks ago FRCD asked for someone willing to partner with them in their endeavors. They are just announcing the result of that and showing some of the growth that their site is having. And I am glad to see that growth, I like their site a lot:D

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

If another entity can outperform CD on community interaction and news/rumors about FRC, I am all for it. Proverbs 27:17 ~ As iron sharpens iron...

That being stated, CD has become the go-to site for any and all things FRC related. As for myself, CD will remain the site for info that I need for items and discussions related to FIRST.

This site exists because of the community involvement - and most likely will continue for some time. I do not foresee any that will overtake it... but I am open to other options!

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

Hey everyone,

First and foremost, let me say that we at GameSense are honored to be working with Matt and FRC Designs. Matt currently does a lot (all) of the work for the FRC Designs website and we're excited to see how the site grows now that the workload isn't so overwhelming.

To speak to a few of the comments above, FRC Designs will continue to operate as usual with design profiles, CAD models, and the blog. Now that we have 5 people running the site, we feel comfortable doing a little more, and decided to focus on improving the blog.

Blogs and forums are very different. Discussion on forums is often much more constructive than discussion in the comments section of a blog post. FRC Designs has no intention of creating another site for FRC discussion. In each blog post, we'll post a link to a CD thread created specifically for discussing that post and vice versa.

"What happens when the blog becomes a resounding success and FRC Designs starts spamming CD with multiple threads a day," you ask? We'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

I predict that as surely as entropy increases in any closed system, the following will occur:

FRC sites that survive for the long haul, and that don't actively cooperate to satisfy complementary needs, will inevitably overlap each other, and balkanize the audience, no matter what their original intentions were.

I'm not suggesting any malice whatsoever exists. I'm simply saying that keeping weeds and other disarray out of a garden requires a gardener.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

If anything, this partnership will take away some of the crowding of FRC sites, not increase it.
And there's plenty of room in our sport for more websites right now. Think about how many websites there are about football fandom or baseball fandom. We've got just a few (CD, TBA, FRCDesigns, Gamesense, beyondinspection, FRCTop25).
Chill.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

I'm sure we could just as easily come up with an axiom about the difficulty of maintaining one super-site.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

I agree; and that difficulty is the price of keeping the disarray and weeds out of the garden I used in my analogy.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

No thanks - Sometimes swimming against the conventional wisdom is useful.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

I get many emails suggesting that The Blue Alliance should branch out to do more things, like including FTC/FLL/VEX results or adding a CAD repository.

My response is typically along the lines of Connor's sentiments about the difficulty of maintaining one super-site. That doesn't mean we can't do these things in the future, but it would be a logistical nightmare right now.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

Eugene,

I'm assuming that you read this thread carefully enough to notice that more than one form of cooperation/collaboration has been tossed out as an example; that no one has claimed to have to exhaustively thought through the pros and cons of any list of possible collaborations; and that creating a super-site has not received any serious support (not so far as I can tell).

So, if creating a single super-site isn't even on the table, and if you can spare a few minutes to do some speculating? What forms of inexpensive cooperation/collaboration *are* worth considering? Do any come to mind for you?

Blake

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

TBA links to other community sites (much like CD once did, but as mentioned earlier in the thread, those links seemed to have disappeared). For example, we link to At The Control on team pages as well as a few other sites here http://www.thebluealliance.com/about, though this list isn't as up to date as we'd like it to be.

We also promote things the community produces, such as posting GameSense's streams on our Facebook page when they go live.

Edit: Another "inexpensive collaboration" that ChiefDelphi implemented a while back was linking to TBA on members' profiles. TBA links to ChiefDelphi threads for robot photo discussion.

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

More exciting news!

We've joined forces with the folks at beyondinspection and they'll be bringing their high quality content to the FRC Designs blog!

This means that we'll be expanding our topics on the blog to everything FRC.

So, if you'd like to be a contributor for the FRC Designs blog, shoot over to this quick survey and tell us about yourself. Possible topics include (and are FAR from limited to) design, strategy, pits, team structure, news, tech, coach profiles, event recaps, and more!

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

For the design side of this, it is obviously going to be covering CAD and mechanical design, but are there currently any plans to include information about software as well?

Re: [FRC Designs] Announcing a New Partnership with GameSense!
 

Absolutely. We already have someone who's shown interest in writing about electrical design as well. If you have something to say about software design, then we want to hear about it. Feel free to fill out the interest form and we'll get in contact with you to discuss more.

Some ideas off the top of my head for software related blog topics:

• How FRC#### designs their software.
• Why proper commenting is important
• The benefits of git, subversion, etc.
• The importance of vision processing in FRC games.