Several years ago, a couple of FRC teams started an organization called Open Alliance, which was set up as a way for teams to share information with each other. This past spring, FTC team 12736 Electric Mayhem Green students got permission to start an FTC version of Open Alliance. This summer, we set up a website, www.FTCOpenAlliance.org, to host this collaboration.
If you are not aware of how Open Alliance works, it is a community of teams that share their robot CAD and Code. They also regularly publish blog posts about their progress throughout the season. We will be using Chief Delphi for these build threads.
FTC Open Alliance will also allow teams to share statistics about their robot and team structure.
The FTC Open Alliance will follow the same protocol that FRC Open Alliance follows.
There are six principles:
Open Alliance teams do not keep secrets.
Open Alliance teams do their best to provide frequent updates throughout the year.
Open Alliance teams use Chief Delphi to post updates and answer questions. They are also encouraged to explore other mediums.
Open Alliance teams provide open code and/or CAD.
Open Alliance teams include the bad and the good.
If your team thinks that they want to participate in the Beta year of FTC Open Alliance, please have a mentor from your team go to the website, and fill out the registration form you find there. We are looking for approximately 20 teams to join us for the Beta year. Any team, even if they are not a part of the Alliance, can view all of the information and posts of the Alliance Teams.
We hope that you will consider joining the FTC Open Alliance and share your expertise with other teams that need help.
The build threads are open, anyone can read and learn about what the teams do. They share their CAD, code, and thought processes. Non participating teams can learn from those that do participate
The teams that participate benefit by getting feedback on their designs and by documenting their work.
While there has been an occasional FTC-related post on CD from time-to-time, CD has been focused on FRC. With this announcement, it seems like there will be many more FTC topics on CD. I’m concerned that this isn’t going to be good for either FRC-focused or FTC-focused individuals. Both types of readers will have to comb through many irrelevant topics to find the ones of interest. The potential for mis-clicks will be high, expecting that a topic was relevant to one competition, but happened to be about the other. At the moment, there is a FIRST Tech Challenge category that could be used for topic filtering if the authors of FTC-related topics use it, but it would be up to each individual author to know it is there and to select it. For the FTC audience, I don’t think there is any reasonable way to filter all the FRC topics.
Is there currently a good way to handle the mostly disjoint audiences for FRC and FTC within CD that I am not aware of? If not, would it be possible to configure something that makes it easy to see only FRC topics, only FTC topics, or see both?
If the topics are categorized you can select what categories show on your feed. Click on the Hamburger menu by the cd icon, then click on the pen beside categories
Would work great for FRC-focus if FTC topic authors chose the Other:FIRST Tech Challenge category, but hard to say how often that would happen. More difficult for FTC-focus having to block the myriad FRC categories and hope that the FTC topic authors are always choosing Other:FTC and none of the FRC categories. While I’m slightly concerned about the extra time I will need to skip over FTC topics, I’m much more concerned that it’s going to be difficult for the FTC participants to find the information of interest to them in a sea of FRC topics. It seems like this may not be the best approach for the FTC audience.
We are going to have teams write their build threads and FTCOA related chat exclusively in the FTC category in order to make it easy to find for those searching for it, and to not clog up the main forums or the preexisting FRC Open Alliance category .
The audience for open alliance is everyone! Anyone who visits the website will be able to see what the member teams post, and get ideas from it. While the build threads are used to discuss designs, strategies, code etc. Anyone who wants to can benefit from it.
You guys should look into maybe having the build logs hosted on the FTC discord as it definitely has a lot more views from FTC people. But definitely a cool idea! I’ll be making sure to follow the teams.
On the registration forum it asks for our chief delphi build thread, do we create and put it under the ftc tag? I couldnt find any other ftc build threads.
The FTC Discord is a great resource for advertising the Alliance, and we’re also currently (tonight) working on a specific FTC Open Alliance discord for prospective and participating members. All build log updates will be posted and subscribing members pinged, in addition to a more dedicated Q&A section for any questions.