Quote:
Originally Posted by ebarker
Basically you have a great idea called 'incentivizing the team to make a submission'.
Let's try this idea.
Invite teams to make a quality submission to the editors. The top ten or so entries are then handed to traditional magazine editors. The magazine editors might then consider covering the design at the Championship for publication.
Several things will happen. 1) the e-book editors and the FRC design website gets content, 2) The magazine gets content, 3) FIRST gets coverage, 4) the submitting team gets coverage.
As an example, consider this article for Popular Mechanics
There were some print articles with teams in them last spring that had projects related to the FIRST Future Inventors Award. The is no reason not to cover interesting FRC robotics.
Nothing like a little incentive to get things done. |
FIRST's "Behind the Design" will be returning.
Earlier this year, we ran it through official FIRST channels and got approval to begin work on a new "Behind the Design". We used a few simple metrics to invite a number of teams to submit. Unfortunately, we've only received a small number of submittals from the teams who originally were interested in participating.
We still intend to publish this year in some manner, though I suspect it may end up being a free document due to the amount of content. We originally were going to charge a nominal fee and donate the proceeds to charity under the participating team's names. (E-book format, published through all the normal outlets).
I believe our struggles on this are our fault in the way we went about gauging interest. Instead of putting out feelers asking which teams would be interested to the entire FIRST community, we went after a select group of very competitive teams who are also quite busy during the summer. I believe we'll fix that issues in volume two next year. It's better to have too much content rather than too little. So next year we'll ask teams FIRST-wide for submissions, then pick those that go into the publication.
As for a very abridged volume one, expect it out later this year. It will return next year, bigger and better. I suspect we'll be looking for guest editors as well, because if submissions are open to the whole community I'm betting we get a "large" response.