**FRC Community Tools Developers Conference for FMS API
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**Blog Date: **Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - 14:59
Please see the note below from the FRC Engineering Team:
There are so many community developed tools that FRC teams and fans use throughout the season to keep tabs on their favorite teams and events, way too many to list. Until now, developers of those tools have been forced to scrape webpages or Twitter feeds for the data. This is not the best way for us to make the needed data available to those developers, and we want to change it.
Developing an API to allow developers access to event data is one of our key goals for this season. But, we want to make sure we’re getting developers the data they need in the way they need it. So, we’re going to be hosting an FRC Community Tools Developers Conference. This conference will give the FRC staff members developing the API the chance to hear directly from the users to ensure it’s everything we want it to be.
The conference is tentatively scheduled for the week of September 15, using an online tool like GoToMeeting.
If you have developed a tool and want to be a part of the conference, please fill out this survey](CCF 2015 FMS API Developers Conference Survey) telling us your name, email address, and the community tool you’d like to use the API for. The survey also asks what time of day works best for you. Once we’ve collected names, we’ll nail down an exact day and time. We’ll also send out a follow-up survey to pre-collect questions to be answered during the event. Please fill out the participation survey by 9/5.
Probably one of my favorite announcements of the summer. I love that they are embracing all the work the community has already done and working to make it easy for them to get better information.
Now if we could find away to ensure high quality video out of every event, I would be a very happy man.
I’m really looking forward to this. I’m hoping we can utilize this to make calculating rankings (specifically for the MN State Championship, but also applies to districts, I would think) easier and less error prone.
I mentioned the likelihood of this happening to Adam last night while we realized that the twitter feed wasn’t the best for what we wanted. He said it was likely but not guaranteed.
With this announcement, I am super excited to have the potential of grabbing all data that we need to make OPR even more accurate without having to deal with a least square regression for estimation.
Looking forward to (and really hoping for) positive results from this meeting. I have a feeling all the requests will overwhelm them, but FIRST has been behind the times on this, so to some degree they deserve it.
This is awesome. I don’t know how to interface with an API, but I am definitely the type of person who appreciates cool data when it becomes more accessible and detailed.
