FIRST Robotics Magazine

[Jessica Boucher]

Um, people....love the idea, but....

Before this gets too far ahead, I think we need to notify Robby that this is being talked about again. He's worked more on this topic than you would believe, and I think he needs to put in his 2 cents before we decide anything major.

[ColleenShaver]

As Ken mentioned earlier- this is something Robby and I have talked about in great depth and detail; Robby even has a copy of the potential cover to the first issue that we had on hand at Nationals last year to show to some of the FIRST staff. We talked to some of the major players (engineer-wise) in FIRST about contributing columns, etc. We have some basic drawing of the layout for a webzine portion, etc, etc

We have a lot of foot work done on this, I personally have just gotten a bit caught up in school work & robots & stuff lately.. given this great interest, it seems like it's time to wake this idea back up again.

We basically wanted this to be done with the support of FIRST and more under their jurisdiction than any one team. We didn't want to step on the toes of what any great teams like Chief Delphi have done for FIRST with this website. Afterall, there are white papers here that if you guys can formalize your ideas can be posted up here.

Personally, after all this talk, I'm going to go back to my notes and see where we left off, along with talking to Robby on the topic.

[Ken Leung]

I knew you two got a lot of thinking done a while ago... I remember Robby telling me about it at kickoff. We were even going to do a report on kickoff itself, but I ended up couldn't do it at the time because I wasn't prepared enough for the necessary material and got caught up with the rest of FIRST stuff after I got back home.

I know the magazine involve doing reports of competition, and doing someone on Dean, but I really can't remember anymore. From what I heard from robby, sounds like you are on the right track, and just need to make things happen.

I am really eager to find out what you two have planned, but I understand it if you want to work this out between yourself before announcing anything. Why don't you e-mail me @ ken_leung@hotmail.com and tell me what I can do for you. Frankly, I think you need a west coast reporter to show you guys what's going on over here...

And I would love to do a report on Nationals this year, now that I have all these time to plan it out before hand. I've got a long list of people I want to talk to, so might as well do little interviews with them while I ask them about their robot.


Like I said before, I really thought this magazine/webzine idea need a lot of thinking through if it is to be really good... Seems like you twos' hard work into this maybe our first step to making it happen!

Thanks everyone for being so exciting about this and won't give up!

[Gene F]

Coleen, Robby, and others,
If you two had some ideas I'd like to help put them into action. Please forward any information on your previous planning to falendys@oconee.sema.slb.com. I'm worried that trying to get FIRST to get behind this without demonstrating that we can make it happen will be difficult. Let's try to get something started and then see if FIRST wants to adopt us.

Gene

[Joe Matt]

1.) Concept...

Lalalalalalalalalalal

2.) Feasiblity

Coin Toss

3.) Reality

Holy C$@P! This is going to cost a lot!

4.) De-Scoping

Chainsaw: VVVVRRUUUMMM, ZZZZZZZZZRRRRRRR, BBBBBBUUUUUUUZZZZZ

5.) Construction:

It's a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be....

6.) Opeining Day

Hip-Hip-Ho-RA!

7.) The Homecoming

HEY I'M BACK! Helo? Anybody remember me??

8.) Concept

Lalalalalalalalalalal.......


We just hit the reality *whap* ow that hurt!

[Mark Hamilton]

I personally would be willing to write articles and do graphic design etc. on a regular basis for this. Furthermore, Im certain our SOAP scouting/strategey database (2x johnson+johnson Sportsman Award winning) would be useful, especially in a featured robot/strategy segment.

[Adrian Wong]

HTML or AOL Text- Should we do the trusty dusty text only version, an HTML version, or forget it all and do a PDF file or something like that.

Just to offer another option: XML. With XML, you can use XSLT to transform the XML into HTML (web sites), PDF (print), and text. You can convert to other formats as well (e.g. voice), but I don't think there'd be a large audience for listening to a magazine article.

[NickG.]

Id love to help out on this thing. I would be willing to write a few articles, or maybe a column for it. Let me know what you need. I was thinking more along hte lines of How To articles and whatnot. Off the top of my head i get things like: "How to fundraise", "How to put your robot on a diet (lightening it up )", "How to better your pit", etc. But whatever column you need me to do is fine. I personalyl dont like the whole spotlight on team thing. I think this zine should help others, have nifty interviews (ie, w/ dean, woodie, special engineers, etc), competition coverage, and tech/FIRST news bits. email me at Saber930@yahoo.com.

-Nick Gauthier
Strategery Liason First Matey (SLFM - pronounced SLaFuM)
Team 365
The Miracle Workerz

[Robby O]

::Yawn::Stretch::Scratch::

I know I should probably jump right onto topic, but I just wanna let everyone know that things are okay with me, as I've done everything but drop off the face of the earth recently. FIRST took me away from the arts for 4 years of my life, and I've had a sudden and powerful reintroduction, with all kinds of performance opportunities and doors opened for me. It's what I've always wanted to do with my life and now it's happening, so I've done everything in the past couple of months to deeply immerse myself back into that community. That includes dropping art school, quitting work, and, unfortunately, ignoring FIRST.

But this topic (and Colleen ::thankyou: snapped my attention back to a community I owe more than I can ever return. So now that you know where my weird head has been the past few months, lemme start with the concept of FIRSTmagazine as it originally began.

I love silly responses to questions, and have been known to be a quite the goofball at times, with all sorts of ideas running amok. However, about a year and a half ago, a newbie to the world of FIRST asked a simple question on the forums and I smarmily replied “Oh, I take it you didn’t read about that in the latest issue of FIRSTmagazine”. Hence that quest began.

It’s been an idea bouncing around in my skull and between others I hold close in the FIRST community. Last year we even gave a mockup of the first cover to Laura London. The biggest problem we had with the magazine has always been “So, okay, what’s it going to contain?”. I see that running across this thread now. And that’s a hard thing to decide. There’s so much involved with FIRST, what do we include? Merely tutorials, or articles, news on technology?

The conclusion that we finally came to was based on a quote from the founder himself:

“Scientists as Superheroes”

That’s the direction, in my (and a few others’) opinion, that FIRSTmagazine should take. Each issue has a featured scientist. There will be an in-depth interview/biography of that scientist, then there will be a pullout poster of that scientist, with a portrait of the scientist on one side, and an artists rendering of the scientist in superhero style a-la popular comic books. Then of course you have the latest news on science happenings. Reports of FIRST and science/technology events.

There will be a section for mechanical, electrical, and software tutorials. Reports on and interviews with kids who have made an impact in their community with FIRST. Papers on how to start projects and follow through with them. Listings of grants and funding for these projects. Internship and scholarship opportunity listings. Contests with science/technology-related prizes. And games and comics around the FIRST community.

It’s a blending of the Arts and Sciences, two true cultural cultivators, to make each other really appeal to a younger generation. FIRSTmagazine is the Newsstand supplement to FIRST – it’s about the inspiring of and helping to launch the careers of young adults. Something to make them all forget TV and just hanging out with friends, but start encouraging them to have an impact on society, even if it’s as small as only their town – that’s still an impact and more than most young people do ever.

There’s so much more detail I can’t even describe right now. And I can only thank everyone who pointed out that I’ve actually put work into this with others before everyone ran off doing their own thing, as has happened in the past. This has been kept on the downlow for that very reason – too much division of the FIRST community due to a lot of “Look at my team, we want an award for this”.

But enough of my nagging. I have a list of people I will be contacting already to get this done, and if anyone is interested, please, let me know. We most definitely do need web developers and maintainers, specifically I’ve been looking at PHP, but I am only one person and perhaps something would suit better. I really wish that I had brought it to the community sooner. If I had known there would have been this much interest and offered commitment, I could have accomplished so much more up to now with everyone’s help.

Also, enjoy the sneak peeks at the original cover design, and check out the clip of some dean artwork I’m coloring for the first issue.

-Robby O
oshortwan@hotmail.com
FIRSTanimators Moderator
“If I had it in me to stop these random thoughts and non-stop dreams, I could deal with this non-stop spinning world” – Less Than Jake

[Robby O]

Icky design, but it was the first of many to come...

[Robby O]

This is just one of the pieces of artwork that I have lined up.

[Gene F]

Robby O,
Thanks for your renewed interest. I love both the cover and the artwork. Lets launch this thing! In order to get started we need people to get started submitting articles. I really don't care what site this thing is associated with. In fact maybe we could distribute it among several sites. Certainly there can be links all over the place. I'm not the greatest of writers but I do have a knack for getting things organized. (professionally I am an engineering project leader) We can all argue the nuances of what it should look like, what it should contain, what format we should use, etc. but until we have some substance it's all for naught. Let's put together a concept issue, share it among ourselves and refine from there. I am willing to collect the articles and such and produce a first cut at a layout for discussion. I've seen too many great concepts die because of "analysis paralisis". Let's pull out those notebooks and light up those keyboards.

Gene

[Wayne C.]

Here is an idea which might aid you in build your webzine

Take all of the team numbers of this year's active teams and mix them in a hat. You might want to make a second hat for the winners of the various events and awards this year.

Each month draw out several candidates and contact them to submit articles on their FIRST season. They will need to give in illustrations and such to enhance their story. You most likely won't get all of them to write but some will.

You can ask for several each month and choose the ones you want. Categories such as award winners, senior teams, rookie teams etc can be made.

Everybody likes to see their names in stories. There are many more teams out there than the dozen or so FIRST seems to showcase. The big mystery would be "who will be in the magazine this month?"

Let the teams tell their story- and do the work

If we can assist at 25 let us know...

(By the way- the keyboard I am writing on has a dead letter __. Can you figure out the missing letter?

[Robby O]

I've been working on the actual design and layout of the magazine, and at the moment the sketches I have resemble USFIRST.ORG. I think it would be a good idea to keep these two sites very similar in design. We definitely need a database to keep track of articles and allow for easy uploading to the server.

So far we were thinking quarterly print issues, with daily updates to the webzine, as daily as was possible. I also really like Wayne's idea, however one thing we may not want to do is prevent any team or individual of a team from submitting work. I do like the idea of a featured team, and perhaps have them do a postmortem of how things are going or went for them in the competitions, as in what went right, what went wrong, why, and how they would improve on it for next year. That too can be split into different award and team divisions, like chairmans, national champions, mechanical side of a team known for amazing mechanical work, postmortem of the animation from the winning team.

To me, this actually reminds me very much of sharingFIRST. The only difference is that there will be guidlines and formatting to be followed keeping everything looking similar, instead of everyone having thier own page. The web submission I see as a "submit an article, wait for approval". The only question I have is what do the writers have to gain? If this magazine is sold on newsstands, would it be feasible to pay a writer if his or her article is approved? I don't see why not.

Then again, all funds could be pushed towards getting FIRST out there, with a few writers from the FIRST world hired to work on the zine on a consistent basis. Should recognition be enough for those who submit but arent staff writers? Or perhaps there is some other compensation, like a private dinner at nationals for all whose articles were accepted, giving them a chance to mingle with the heads of FIRST, as well as current scientific, technological, and political leaders. Hmm... yet more to debate about.

-Robby O
oshortwan@hotmail.com
FIRSTanimators Moderator

[Brandon Martus]

I don't know if this is what you had in mind, but thinking of news & approvals & all that kinda stuff, I keep thinking of phpNuke.

Its sort of like slashdot and slash code.. basically a portal, with news headlines, etc..

Its fully customizable, and open-source, so you could possibly use it as a base platform, and customize/build up from there..

phpNuke