How to verify official role of a team member

How can you verify a status of a team member on a team?
Ex. verifying mentors vs captains vs students, is there a way via FIRST API to do so?

Captains are not denoted as part of FIRST registration, but mentors and students would be, but I’m not sure if it would be a good idea to leave that kind of info just searchable by any random person. Either way the Team rosters are NOT part of a public API you can call.

Here is the full API guide for FIRST Inspires

nothing about rosters to be found there, just team info like events, sponsors, etc

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What is ur end goal that u need that information?

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Team page editing, right now it’s manual verification of who someone is to give permission.

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this ^

Building you own “Single Source of Truth” is probably easier than scraping the FIRST API constantly.

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Your team uses an authentication system for accessing resources? Or you list team members on the site like a roster?

If it’s authentication I mean to me this should be done as part of having your students register with FIRST inspires. Have them make an account with your system at the same time or build it from just your teams roster PDF (your 2 lead mentors can access this). You can parse through a PDF for each mentor/student’s info and confirm it matches the email/ name associated.

FIRST won’t release that info though on their end to an API for privacy reasons. Not every student/mentor wants their name in a publically searchable database. Your team can make that decision for themselves but FIRST won’t do it en masse.

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Authentication for editing team pages for coaches mentors and team captains. We don’t actually need to know who’s on the roster just to be able to prove someone who claims to be someone is who they are.

FIRST’s API does not contain any team membership information in any publicly accessible system.

There is no publicly usable workflow to verify team member status by a third party that isn’t in some way affiliated by that team.

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Oh, so you’re trying to find out if someone who claims to be on any team is actually a member of that team? I think kingc95 thought you were trying to do this for members of your own team only.

I’m also assuming this is related to the TBA alternative thread. TBA’s approach to allowing teams to manage media on their page (for a couple years now) has been to distribute keys in the virtual kit of parts, similar to a voucher code. This helps provide some proof that the individual with a key is associated with the team in some way, and that one of the two head mentors has trusted them with the key. It’s not a particularly quick or easy solution, though - it requires you to convince FIRST to include your key in the kit, and it’s only available to teams at a certain point in the season, and once teams have paid for registration.

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FWIW - This is definitely treading near Personal Identifiable Information which has a lot of requirements around it.

US Dpt. of Labor - Guidance on the Protection of Personal Identifiable Information | U.S. Department of Labor

Canadian Law - Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act

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and don’t even crack open the can of worms known as the gdpr!

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Don’t forget COPPA

Many FIRST students are over the age of 13 but many in FTC/FLL are not and they are part of the same registration system.

Technically there isn’t a lower age limit to FRC so students on a team could be under 13. It’s a big mess FIRST wouldn’t want to deal with definitely. I’m sure they already have to deal with this somewhat since they are a youth targeted organization, but they wouldn’t want to run any risks of violating their ability to have online data for youth members at all

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You could use TBA to do it in the same way that you verify ownership of a domain with DNS records

@cheez
What I mean is if a user wants to claim to be associated with a team, they’ll get an image to upload to the TBA media of that team, which is possible only if you got access to the dashboard from the key you get in the FIRST dashboard, so this way you can prove who you are.
Obviously it’s best if you could get the same mechanic as TBA, or even better a private/public key to identify as a mentor of a team or something like that, but still the image solution would work

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Thats an interesting thought, I appreciate the explanation

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