Make 2011 the year of Acknowledgment
 

This and every other year it is no secret that many teams gain inspiration from the designs of other teams. One of the things that has always bothered me is that there is little to no acknowledgment of idea's inspiration. When you are writing a paper in school teachers always asked for a bibliography. When you Submit a Patent application or even give a presentation you always give citations. Robotics should be no different, especially for something so easy to do.

So I challenge teams to publicly state where their inspirations for designs come from. It may be a footnote at the bottom of a judges book or presentation panel. Some teams may want to go further and put a small sticker on the robot "Design inspired by team XXXX"

I know very well that there may be multiple sources of ideas and many robots that teams look at for ideas, I am mainly suggesting that if you use a complete robot or subsystem as the basis of yours that you give credit where credit is due. In a Year where there will be a "minibot arms race" we will see these bots getting faster and faster as people see what is possible from their peers. Let the original innovators know that their designed helped you to accomplish your goals. In our open community of ideas it is a good thing to keep iterating your designs and pushing for that next development, using the information which has come before is just part of the process.




Another aspect of this is that I am personally curious how the spread of ideas happens in a small community like FRC. Almost like a social study on sharing genius.

Re: Make 2011 the year of Acknowledgment
 

Great idea, but after we've pasted all our inspirations on our robot, we won't have any room for our sponsors!
I have yet to meet a team or individual at any Robotics competition (or online forum) that did not inspire me in some way.

Re: Make 2011 the year of Acknowledgment
 

Something cool I always wanted to do was write the team number of the team that most inspired each mechanism directly on the actual mechanism. However, before 2010 this was probably illegal as it could be construed as an actual team number. Now that team numbers are on bumpers though...

Re: Make 2011 the year of Acknowledgment
 

If it's worth anything, at Nationals, our robot had the team numbers of our other alliances in about 1 inch tall print and the inspectors had no problem with it.