I don’t really have an opinion on this. Do you think it’s fair to give unsolicited feedback to OA teams on their thread? Or is it better to let them fail and learn from their mistakes?
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If I were on an OA team I would more than welcome feedback.
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Absolutely give feedback, one of the best parts of having an open build is getting feedback from the community. One of the hardest parts of having an open build is figuring out which feedback to listen to.
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We haven’t done OA because it’s been too large of a commitment, but the largest reason why we consider doing it is so we can get as many eyes as possible on our designs to recommend improvements. There are a lot of design styles out there that we would never think of but would greatly benefit from.
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I guess as an addition, why don’t I see that much feedback on oa team’s threads?
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OA team here, Please give feedback. Not only are you helping the OA teams, but you also help other people who are reading OA content.
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Another OA team here, please please please give feedback, it’s been super useful when we do get it.
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Another OA team here, 100% give feedback and ask questions. We share our content to help teams and we enjoying hearing about the successes (and failures) when developing on our ideas and prototypes.
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Some conjecture:
- Build season is a really busy time for most members of this community. Folks may not have the time to give thoughtful feedback on another team’s design choices.
- People may not know that feedback is welcome (this thread is a good reminder). Some people are generally hesitant to give feedback, especially when it isn’t explicitly requested.
- A lot of Open Alliance teams are doing really impressive things, and doing an excellent job documenting it. Your average team may not have substantive feedback to provide.
- Personally disagree with this rationale, but I believe some people may be trying to gain a competitive advantage that they believe can be realized by not helping their competitors during the design phase.
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It is hard to give feedback based on pretty limited information. It’s also difficult to keep up with dozens of teams.
My main suggestion for feedback is to ask pointed questions. That way you aren’t assuming the team isn’t doing something or didn’t think of something but you are also pointing out the potential flaw or new idea. “Have you thought about using a larger diameter pivot to reduce the chance of shearing your pivot hex shaft?”
Or give feedback from your real experience with examples. Something like “When we built a wrist on just a hex shaft in 2019 we had it snap at an event, you may want to think about using a larger diameter pivot shaft.”
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1155 joined OA this year partially because we felt that the potential for feedback from a much wider audience was an incredibly valuable resource, and we welcome any kind of feedback. It’s great when we get positive feedback on something we’re doing right, and it’s good to hear when we might be doing something wrong.
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Feedback is a key benefit to being an OA team.
Folks like @AllenGregoryIV @Ty_Tremblay and @Justin_Foss (and innumerable others) have helped us save tons of time over the years with good questions and helpful feedback.
I struggle to follow even a small number of OA teams during build though, most of my energy goes towards managing 95s OA thread. However, getting tagged for a specific question or item to review will always get my attention.
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I’ve asked “probing questions” before. Like, “Hey, looks cool, but how did you prevent X?”… knowing that my real concern was that their design had an issue with X. But, I also wanted to know how they would fix the issue if it popped up.
While a large chunk of active CD users are mentors, there is a larger group of students who do the posting for OA threads (it seems). So, I understand the caution in posting feedback that can seem critical or negative. But framed in the right way, there is nothing wrong with it.
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As an OA team, we 100% want feedback and questions. We put everything out there to help teams, and having questions/feedback helps to create even more helpful content.
There were 79 teams listed as Open Alliance for 2023. If you include 111 and 112, that makes 81. Of them, I roughly kept up with ~10 of them that regularly put out content worth reading/looking at.
When I did look at other OA threads, they often didn’t put out regular, well-written content, and the last thing I’d want to do is make the students posting feel bad about putting themselves and their team out there by criticizing it (obviously criticism and constructive feedback aren’t quite the same thing, but some of the difference is in the eye of the party getting feedback).
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I will say we have received useful help on our thread though we did ask for help on a couple of topics. Please feel free to ask us leading or probing question about how we handled a particular problem you feel we may encounter. OR feel free to offer help on issues we say we are having and haven’t solved.
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Echoing other posters, please give feedback it’s very nice
helped us find and solve some issues that we didn’t see even though i did have to dig through Discord to find it
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