Call for Volunteers

[Timothy D. Ginn]

As many of you know, the openFIRST project has, in the past year, relied heavily on the contributions of a few individuals. Well, now the three main developers have all graduated from high school.

As you may or may not have noticed, the focus of FIRST web site design is on students. High school students are supposed to take the responsibility of designing, implementing, programming, and advancing their team site. The FIRST rules have clarified this point, however exactly what constitutes a student-built, student-designed web site is not perfectly clear.

After much discussion, several months ago the openFIRST team realised that continuing to develop openFIRST throughout this summer, or throughout our University careers might jeopardise the eligibility of teams choosing to run the openFIRST software. As such, we have collectively decided that we will no longer be directly involved in developing new features.

All those involved feel they have learned a great deal about not only coding, but small group dynamics, marketing, handling bug reports, code management, databasing, and numerous other topics. openFIRST has provided each of us with a substantial addition to his resume and University applications.

I encourage those who are looking for a new project this summer, or in the future, to contact me. I will continue to play a primarily administrative role for the openFIRST system. I am willing to teach interested people the skills that they will require, and previous programming experience is not required (though it would help).

Some skills that would be useful to have for the openFIRST project include:

Graphic Design
PHP Programming
Linux
Databasing
Word Processing
Internet Web-Browser use
Writing
Marketing
Researching
Testing

I would like to see the project grow, and encourage others to suggest ideas. openFIRST is currently used by a fair number of teams, and the last batch of changes we made was to make it easier to install (in fact, I've clocked an install of an openFIRST system from a plain OS install, after downloading the components, and including the time to setup the web server and PHP extensions to be under 10 minutes, and was able to talk new users through the process quite easily).

Even those who do not have the time to contribute regularly are welcome. It's always useful to have people patching the outstanding bugs.