The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

The Blue Alliance is going to be entering its third year of operation this season. We started the website back in the fall of 2006 to produce tutorial videos, then added the Match Archives during the 2007 season. The website has gotten a lot more useful (and prettier!) over these two years, and we're still trying to improve things further.

To this extent, I feel like it would be very useful to involve the community more tightly with going-ons with The Blue Alliance. There are a lot of smart people with a lot of great ideas that read these forums, and if we could figure out some way to tap into that, we could make The Blue Alliance more useful for everyone who participates in FIRST.

One of the most immediate ways we're thinking about is opening the website redesign we have planned for this fall to the community. If everyone works together to fix the UI issues the current site has, we could wind up with a new TBA site that is a total breeze to use.

What do you think are the best ways to enable people to contribute to TBA? What skills, knowledge, or passion would you be willing to contribute to the community?

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

The site is already great!! The one improvement is somehthing more could help with and that's getting more match video up. The two regionals we attended last year were not included in the archives. :( This is exceptionaly sad because last year's Palmeto Regional I think set a record for the most matches played to decide the champion. There were two ties in the final alone!

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

As long as there is a decent quality control process in place for any community additions, it sounds like a great idea.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

i didnt find out about it until after the season, but if you could get the match result e-mails to work, that would be great

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I wish someone would make a recorder that triggered off of the match start and would then record the next 5 minutes. This would auto parse the match footage and thus require less edit time to get video on the blue alliance. Pinancle has that nice straight to hard-drive recorder. If it could be triggered off of a match controller system, that would be awesome.

TBA does an awesome job. We just need to do a better job feeding it.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I can design in asp.net 2.0 w/VB code , and SQL if this is of any help.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

One thing I'd like to see is the score screen at the end of each video (and complete videos... sometimes the parser cuts off the very end (ex. IRI, final match)).

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I wonder if we could get FIRST to give us access to start, stop, match aborted, and score up signals for a match that could be read using a serial port or something similar. That would make a recorder easier to write and very powerful.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I personally think that the site is great as it already is.

Just like others have already said, have videos for all matches and have the FINAL score of the matches as some might have what it was throughout the game and not the final after peneltys and such.

Maybe have people help in making thier own torturials as those seem to of stopped, at least since the last time I looked, or submit ideas for them.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I'm not sure how much support FIRST has given, but I definitely think with the amount that we pay to attend regionals, some sort of funding/technical support should be used for this effort.
TBA has proven to be an effective way to document match footage and I'm sure hundreds use this site.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

can you get the allianvce selection video on there?

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I will be testing the Pinnacle Setup at Kettering Kick-off, I am going to work with the Video Mixer Technician and have them start the recording just before the teams are announced and then stop after they show the final score of the matches. That way all of the matches are already separated. I would also like to get the alliance selections and award ceremonies as well.

The setup is fairly simple and takes up minimal space. The Pinnacle recorder actually powers the usb portable hard drive, so only one power cable is needed.

If you would like to see the setup at Kettering, feel free to find me in the pits.

-Clinton-
EngiNERDs - Team 2337

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I will send Jim Z. your way. Thanks. I have been planning on buying one of these.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

Shouldn't be too hard to do that; SOAP has at least some of those. (Then again, SOAP doesn't have a lot from 2008, last I checked.)

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

It would be really cool if The Blue Alliance turned into the FIRST Encyclopedia way beyond what it is today. Taking all the info from team logos, robot history, parts catologs, everything that would be described into a powerful resource.

I'd also like to see TBA turn into SportsCenter for FIRST. Lots of talking to other teams about their progress and letting other teams know with a type of FIRST news series. Large discussions on how to best play the FIRST game, What teams have been able to accomplish in the game.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I know its hard enough to get match video from regionals as is, but what about a short interview with some of the key teams? Say when I go to look up 1114 and 233, there is an optional video I can watch that has one of the students in the pits discussing how the team designed their arm and how it works. If a team, say 272, had a really cool idea for a magnetic shooter, they can talk about how great it has worked for them, or elude to any troubles they have had during a specific match (like the trackball firing toward the audience after power was shut off, but luckily the arm held it inside the robot), Then I could go find that match and watch it.

This would be a pretty easy addition, Just give people that are already scouting a camera with video mode.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

Having TBA, FIRST, and SOAP team up sounds like a good idea...

Maybe just take information from FIRSTwiki....

TBA could be even cooler than it already is, especially with all the teams that don't have a [decent] website...

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

TBA should calculate average contribution data for each regional and the overall AC (similar to 1114 data that was published).

Also displaying awards won at each regional would be cool or maybe a virtual trophy case with all of their awards over the years.

Ability to submit team logos would be useful as well.

-Oris-

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

To keep developers interested in contributing to community websites, you should make a developers mailing list (on googlegroups or mailman). Have people discuss what they can contribute and ask questions about additions.

I think integrating FIRST wiki information would be a crucial step to getting more information on a team.

Google maps and team locations are also very important
http://mentorsearch.us

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I like this idea. A lot.

I'd be totally willing to help out if TBA wanted to do this. Then again, I'd be willing to help TBA with anything! It's a valuable resource and I would love to see it grow- if I can be a helpful part of that, then please y'all, let me know. :)

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I would definitely be interested, but between my other projects this year(see sig), I'm not sure how much time I'm actually going to have...definitely keep me in the loop as far as what you decide to do...

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

(Disclaimer: These are following post is ideas only. I am far to busy right now with my classes, existing projects, and social life to try taking on another project. After I wrap up a few other projects I may take on these...)

Okay, so there are a lot of ideas here about getting additional content onto TBA, with things like additional photos and videos of that team. While not all teams have extensive presences on the web, some do, and many of these have all their data stored in databases.

So why not right a reverse TBA API, sets up a standard protocol to read from an XML or RSS file or something of that nature hosted on each team's website. This protocol could contain things like additional photos or videos, which would then get "embedded" inside that teams information on their TBA page.

Of course there would have to be some sort of authentication necessary to prove that for example Joe123 is really from team 123. There would also have to be some kind of community-based Report Abuse kind of feature to report inappropriate/irrelevant stuff, spam, etc.


Also (this is something I can help with), it would be really nice if all of the match video was encoded in h.264. I can encode into high-quality*, iPod Touch/iPhone resolution h.264 video at almost 200% playback speed, so converting an entire regional's worth of videos (assuming they have already been cut up into matches) takes about 4-5 hours, which can be easily done overnight. (Hurray VisualHub!)

Plus, if all the video is in h.264, importing into iTunes and copying to iPods/iPhones for video scouting is really easy.

* 640x480 or 704x384, 1320 kbps h.264, 128 kps AAC Stereo; which ends up being about 9 Mb per minute.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I would love to see something on TBA to help coordinate recording of all the regional's this year (keeping a list here on CD was a bit of a pain last year...). Most importantly a page that allows volunteers to sign-up for a regional to help record, and lets multiple people connect to organize the recording of an event. It would also have to include instructions how to upload the video and naming standards to use.


It would also be useful to have this for webcasts. I could probably also put up a quick guide how to set up a Stickam or Ustream webcast (it really isn't hard at all).

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I've posted a thread about redesigning The Blue Alliance website, and I'd love feedback from everyone (technical and non-technical people!) about how you use TBA and what you'd like to see kept, removed, or added to our new design for 2009!

Please add your thoughts in our site redesign thread.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

Here's my personal opinion -
I think TBA and CD are both invaluable resources for existing teams, and I wouldn't change a thing.

I felt there was a need to have a site powered by the FIRST community, but was more public facing; something that would hopefully inspire more teams to get started, or help students find teams when their school didn't have one.

I started FIRST Objective to fill this gap. I've also added what I think are valuable resources to FIRST teams, to try to build a solid user base.

I feel that through TBA, CD and FIRST Objective we are meeting the needs of the FIRST community and out into the general public.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

In my opinion, I think that videos should be greatly contributed my the community. I notice that there are lots of videos that aren't available for most teams. That should be fixed.

Also, I think The Blue Alliance is perfect right now, The only expansion I can think of is possibly more content, and possibly expanding into FTC. FTC is fast growing with the new kit, and it'd be great to see an organized video archive for that.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

maybe make FTC theredalliance.com?

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I'm confused as to what your site does.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

It's very simple. FIRST Objective has tons of videos (lots of team promo videos), with forums, maps, blogs, calendars, along with user profile spaces, personal messaging systems and lots more.

I'm encouraging teachers and school administrators to visit my site through various sites that educators visit.

I want to help more schools start FIRST teams.

FIRST Objective is an outward reaching site, we're not preaching to the choir.

Take a minute and check it out.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

What I would like to see is videos of teams delivering workshops or presentations to their students or others that they might find of interest to the community on things such as design, EE, programming, inventor, fundraising strategies, scouting, etc. So... I guess I'm saying if you wanted to go into further detail as to what your original site was all about, providing tutorials and resources to teams, you might be able to fill yet another gap.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I encourage discussion regarding specific changes to The Blue Alliance site to be posted in this thread specifically about that so we can keep this thread about how the community could help TBA develop.

Just want to keep things organized :)

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

Sorry, I wouldn't change anything with regards to The Blue Alliance.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

Greg, sorry if the way I worded it was off -- but I was trying to imply that teams would have to submit that content to you, so it'd be more like a categorizable youtube of sorts where teams would be contributing to help other teams through these videos focused on specific areas.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

Sorry if my reply to this thread seemed like I was trying to quash discussion. I was just trying to encourage people with specific ideas for changing the TBA site to post in the threads that was about specific ideas for changing the TBA site. Other discussion is still completely welcome here :)

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

What I'd like to see added to The Blue Alliance is live feeds from each of the regionals as it happends (IE a single place to go to see all the regionals).

From there we might then (re: later on) add announcers and color commentary.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I'm willing to help with the backend however you need it. Let me know.

I think some of the good ideas mentioned earlier are the SportsCenter-like segments (I love that idea), and different videos of teams in their shops during build season.

Daniel, I think what you're describing is already in place by Matt Keller of SOAP 108. This past season he introduced SOAP Gameday, which is a portal of sorts that you could go to see all the regionals at once, or each individual feed (still on their site) with more information and a chatroom. Very awesome and popular resource. He's currently working on a new version for next season.