Make 2011 the year of Acknowledgment

[Greg Needel]

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.