Brainstorm - The Blue Alliance v4

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!

I'd pull up matches from Newton for 1714's demos sometimes. Video quality wasn't very good since that year's video was ripped from the webcast but it got the job done.

I would have used TBA for scouting but there was very little video this year, so I can't really comment on that.

[J93Wagner]

I've noticed that while typically the content of the match is good, at least for what i've been looking at, the low quality rivals that of Youtube at times, making what was an awesome match look a lot less awesome...

[Alex Cormier]

1. Quality of videos...
2. Have a year by year section of just robot photos in numerical order.
3. Bring back the quick search for teams on the right, it was replaced? with a google search.

[XaulZan11]

One thing that I would like to have is a team's history on all one page. Sometimes I want to see if a team is historically good or not. You could basically have each years events, record and result (not selected, quarterfinalist...). Of course, you can then click on each of these events or years for those videos.

I don't think this has been mentioned but maybe have the final seedings/rankings for each event.

I'm not sure I like having a lot of 'user generated' stuff (robot specifics/pit scouting, user posted videos of pre-ship, scouting data). Unless we can get atleast 80% of the data, I think everything will be so sparse that it would become meaningless and never looked at. In regards to the scouting data, unless I know whose data it is, I would never take any of it seriously.

Thanks again for all the work put into TBA. It has really made scouting super easy the past few years.

[rulesall2]

Originally Posted by Phoenix Spud

I would like to see it be a combo of the current site and the ideas from TheRedAlliance.net .

The only problem I can see here is teams inflating their abilities, which is mainly what happens in pit scouting anyways.

Originally Posted by M.Wong

Integration with the First Wiki?

I like this suggestion a bit more, and coupled with an option for teams to upload their own competition photos separate from their official robot photo would be cool too. Teams could post cool robot action shots and really show off their spirit to other teams and potential FIRSTers/sponsors. I think there is a lack of photos that exemplify the excitement of FIRST competitions readily available other than what you can scrounge up off of team's websites and Facebook pages. For organization of the photos, you could integrate almost like a Facebook type tagging system that would make it easy to find photos of your team posted by others.

Any other suggestions? I really like where some of these suggestions are headed, and I would once again like to thank all of the hard working people at TBA.


-Jack

[keehun]

Maybe hop on the HTML5 bandwagon... :-)

[Chris is me]

A random suggestion: Often I'll go straight to /tbatv/team/xxxx and type the wrong number. This redirects me straight to a tumblr page, which means I have to retype the whole URL to "try again". If you could leave random unassigned teams / events at a 404 type page, that would be much preferred.

[Dale]

Having a place for teams to describe the features of their robot and have multiple robot photos (or videos) would be a huge help in scouting. The bluealliance could become the first place everyone goes when getting ready for a regional. Currently, at least for early regionals, there's not much reason to go to TBA because video hasn't been loaded yet and all you get is a picture of the robot (if that).

The field video feed isn't all that useful in scouting because it hops around so much between robots or pictures of the drivers(!). Having video clips the teams (or others) load of that particular robot in action would be more helpful.

When uploading robot picture(s) it should be possible to send large files and have the site scale them down and rotate them if needed. Often times the robot picture in done in portrait but the site wants landscape as I recall.

[Jamie Kalb]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!

I've used TBA to explain the game challenge (post-season). Often I'll try to explain it with the game animation, but the people I'm explaining to can't visualize actual robots playing it. Then I'll show them a really well-played match from TBA , and they go, "Ohhhhh, that's what it looks like!" Post-season 2009, I showed a lot of people this match. It helped a lot in recruiting for my team.

I've also used TBA during the season to scout teams going into their second regional. It helps a lot to know not just that someone dominated a regional, but how they dominated it.

I <3 TBA! Thanks so much Greg and company!

[artdutra04]

Right now teams post content everywhere, on team sites, Chief Delphi, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Flickr, Picassa... During the competition season trying to find videos or photos of robots is difficult. Most can be found with enough persistence, but it's difficult. The content usually already exists, so a very good feature would be to help get a lot of the external content embedded or linked to from the TBA page.

One initial one would be to upload a photo to CD-Media, and tag it with YYYY robot and frcXXXX, where YYYY is the current year, and XXXX is your team number. Since the photo gets approved to CD, then it's an appropriate photo. This photo can either be an embedded image or a link to CD-Media. Maybe even cache the thumbnail and link to original on CD to avoid bandwidth leeching. This system would replace the current "email to TBA" means for getting team photos on the site, as it would use the the strengths of CD-Media and TBA to complement each other.

Another way would be to add in links to YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, Flickr and/or content on a team's website (URL domain name must match the one listed in FIRST database) for additional videos and photos. I don't really like the idea of "team inputted robot information", as all teams beat their chest and exaggerate their abilities. But photos and videos of robots are harder to fake. It's easier to see if the team's claims are true.

Host official match video in a downloadable format on your server (h.264 or MPEG-4, so they're viewable on mobile devices). Upload the streaming versions of the match videos to YouTube or Vimeo. (Is there a Vimeo iPod/iPhone/iPad app?)

Create a means for user-submitted match videos on YouTube or Vimeo to be added to matches. Provides another point of view, and can help get some video for matches which have no official video recordings.

I've been thinking about using YouTube/Vimeo/Flickr tags or Twitter hashtags to automatically pull in content, but verifying it's authentic and not spam might be difficult. But this would be awesome if some kind of solution is worked out. (Maybe a team can have a specific "whitelist" of specific accounts to look for video/content from?) Maybe this solution can even be extended to matches: tag the match video with the proper naming convention already used for videos on the site, and it'll automatically pull the video into the site.

Sorry if these thoughts seem meandering. Just thinking out loud.

[Radical Pi]

Perhaps an "official" TBA iPhone/Android/other smartphone app could be made to make everything very mobile-friendly

[Dale]

Or, assuming custom apps are beyond what you're looking to do, at least have a mobile version of the website optimized for small screens and no Flash thanks to Steve Jobs.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by Dale

Or, assuming custom apps are beyond what you're looking to do

Any idea is fine for this discussion. If you have ideas that are not website specific, feel free to throw them down here as well.

[StevenB]

Several people have asked for information on raw match scores, penalties, and so forth. This year, that's a relative piece of cake, thanks to the FRCFMS twitter feed. This year, it contains the number of balls scored for each alliance, the number of bonus points, and the number of penalties. From this, it isn't hard to calculate the QPs for each team (except in the rare cases when a team is disqualified and receives 0 QPs) and generate the match rankings. With the scores and penalties available, it should also be pretty simple to calculate OPR and CCWM in real-time.

I've written a little Python script which grabs data from past tweets using the Twitter API. It doesn't do anything with the results yet, but the concept is workable. It's trivial to port to PHP if that's better for integration with TBA. I'd love to see TBA have a listing of world OPR/CCWM rankings, and show it on each team's page.

[AlexD744]

I basically would like to reiterate on some of the previous points that are most important to me.

1) Bring back the team search on the right that was replaced by the google search.

2) I love the idea of showing what awards a team received for the different events on their page. And the idea of saying this team was "4th seed alliance catian" or "picked 1st by the 7th seed alliance catain."

3) More videos, and any of the ideas stated above that suffice to do that would be fine with be.