On behalf of the Open Alliance planning committee, we’re delighted to announce details for 2025 and beyond for The Open Alliance.
The Open Alliance continues to grow and evolve as many teams contribute to and utilize resources generated by these awesome teams. We want to remove as many hurdles as possible to joining OA and help teams who are participating create content that is educational and beneficial to the FRC community.
This year, there will not be an official registration process to join FRC Open Alliance as there has been in the past.
Your team can create a build blog in the FRC Open Alliance category and start posting! We will have a 2025 season FRC Open Alliance directory located here FRC Open Alliance Directory | 2025 REEFSCAPE Season and teams who wish to be listed can fill out their information at https://forms.gle/VDB515Gd4Emm3u8J8 | The directory will usually be updated weekly.
Posting quality content: We want to encourage all teams to focus on posting quality content that will help benefit the community. Check out this great breakdown on creating quality posts and content from 3847 Spectrum at https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/spectrum-3847-build-blog-2024/447471/584
Making your thread a wiki: If the OP’s trust level is not high enough to create a wiki please have a mentor send @Tyler_Olds a DM and I will create a wiki for your build blog so you can edit your top post.
2025 Open Alliance Show: We will continue creating a set of shows during weeks 2-6 of the build season to help keep up to date on various team’s progresses. If your team is interested in participating, please go to https://forms.gle/BA8P9RQwDiVppbW5A after your team has created it’s 2025 Build Blog thread here on ChiefDelphi.
If you have any questions or comments, please post here and a member of the OA committee will respond.
The discord server was deprecated for various reasons, mostly due to the founding group and admins coming to the conclusion that even with various moderation tools and bots, Discord does not provide a safe space for students and thus we made the tough decision to shut it down and delete the server. There will be no replacement. Open Alliance is about building community, so we obviously spent a lot of time considering this, but above all else, safety of the students comes first.
Our guidance is for teams to really lean into their own Chief Delphi blogs. We understand it’s not the same, but it has been proven you can build a community that will engage with, and inspire conversation beyond just posting what you’re doing week to week. If you look at the number of posts in any of the big OA threads, it shows that many will treat this as a conversation, but that needs to be fostered by the team posting the blog. Ask insightful questions, query for feedback on a prototype, post often to drive engagement. Another major issue is Discord is difficult to find and look for information, searching is not a great experience, and a proper CD blog is a much better way to communicate your information, which is the ultimate goal of the alliance.
The long and short of it is we want OA to be something that teams can take and run with, and we encourage teams to explore what that means for themselves. We would like to reiterate that if you create a discord, we ask that you don’t label it as an open alliance discord. Of course we understand teams are free to do as they please, but we’d appreciate if everyone could respect our wishes there.
Looking forward to reading everyone’s blogs this year, all the best!
I’m excited to have all the information in one place, it will be extremely helpful. There are so many small tidbits of information that can go a long way for so many teams. We were not aware of the discord till after the season ended, so don’t know the exact efficacy of the discord. But the build threads with engagement back and forth have proven to be very useful.
Thanks for putting this out there! You may want to update the closing information so there isn’t any confusion regarding the discord server:
“Returning members: Please make sure you are familiar with changes to OA for 2024 which are located in announcements on Discord and will be provided in the email sent.”
While I agree wholeheartedly with every other reason you’ve provided on shutting down the OA Discord (poor searching is such a problem), this reads more like “I did not want to put the effort into proper moderation for the server”, which I think is valid, I just wish you’d say that outright. Shutting down the OA discord doesnt magically makes these problems go away, it just means you can turn a blind eye to them more easily.
Otherwise, im excited to see what OA 2025 has to offer. There was some great designs and blogs last year and I hope it continues.
Unless thing have changed from the last time this was discussed on CD, my understanding is that the issues are more fundamental to the Discord platform than just a lack of moderation man-hours. If I remember correctly, a combination of DMs happening outside the purview of moderators and issues with the retention of deleted messages.
OA’s lack of discord presence wont fix that. If you want it fixed, remove kids from the internet. I’m only half joking.
My understanding is that OA closed because nobody wanted to put the effort into the moderation. They can scapegoat the other reasons, and its not like they’re bad reasons, but if you trust CD to be a magical safe haven then I dont know what to tell you.
(Disclaimer: I am a FUN correspondent but have never done any OA content or worked directly with the OA group)
I am an admin/moderator on our team discord and keeping the very simple rule of “Students don’t dm Mentors cause they can’t respond and mentors don’t respond to any DM from a student” is something we just had to hope was being followed because I can’t check anyone’s discord DMs. However we keep the discord free of anyone who hasn’t attended a meeting within the previous year to make sure our mentors are all still background checked.
CD is not a magical safe haven but I assume some level of admin can check any DM I or anyone else have on here.
So I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to moderate a discord where there is no real control or guarantee the platform you are using and potentially convinced a student from anywhere on the planet to join won’t be used nefariously.