Organization of online resources- needs work?

FIRST General Forum
1

Hi all,
I’m here to express some frustration with the plethora of resources online. Not the resources themselves, but the fact that they’re scattered all over the place.

For instance, here are some great sites, each with tons of info and links to more info:
http://www.mentorsearch.us/training
http://first.wpi.edu/
http://firstdev.wpi.edu/
http://www.usfirst.org/community/frc/content.aspx?id=478
http://www.usfirst.org/community/frc/content.aspx?id=7006
http://www.usfirst.org/community/frc/content.aspx?id=7010
http://www.firstroboticscanada.org/site/resources
http://www.firstwiki.net/ (which is mirrored at http://wiki.chiefdelphi.com/ ?)
http://www.firstnemo.org/resources.htm

http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Robotics/Competitions/FIRST_Robotics_Competition/
http://art.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ResourcesLinks
http://kevin.org/frc/
http://frcoder.sourceforge.net/

http://firstbasefrc.autodesk.com/?nd=home
http://decibel.ni.com/content/community/first
http://www.ptc.com/appserver/common/account/student.jsp


http://www.chiefdelphi.com/
http://frcdirector.blogspot.com/
http://www.thebluealliance.net

http://www.fsrobotics.org/moe365//moementum/moementum.php
http://www.mvrt.com/2008/resources/trainings.php
http://www.team358.org/files/
http://www.simbotics.org/workshops
http://team341.com/tiabdocs/tiab_blue.html
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/?
http://wiki.robojackets.org/w/TE_Sessions

It’s just really, really annoying to download six gazillion files to dig through, and then to not be able to trace back where I got it from. It just plain, gives me a headache X___x

Also, they’re often stuck on individual team websites and it’s not clear which ones can be reused or modified (apologies to MOE, but for me personally, it hurts to look at the site, and disabling styles isn’t ideal) or updated. They’re of varying quality. Many of them are stuck in pdf format which makes it difficult to reuse. Half the links on chiefdelphi’s portal are dead. Some of them are just text on websites, which get lost since I tend to look at files which are in the majority.

Is there no way, instead of having resources on individual team websites, to instead have a central repository? Where the stuff from all the documents etc. is available online in the browser, and the downloading is only if you like it and want to print something off. And it’s clear what type of I suppose license everything is under. Some sort of collaboration to improve existing resources or organize them instead of dumping files online. So the files are, like a wiki, open to everyone to update or create derivatives for their own uses. A distinction between print versions, which are static and can be outdated but were used at one point, and the online version, which should always be up-to-date.

Or at least some sort of social bookmarking, where users can submit, rate, take notes from, comment on the quality of, tag resources. E.g. comment on each individual file. Also, there are links and documents on the wide web not specific to FIRST but still completely applicable, that could be organized in reference to FIRST.

Can’t we do better? There’s so many great resources, I just feel like they’re all buried in this massive pile of a combination of webpages and files.

What do you guys do to sort through all of this? Is there some other solution? Thoughts in general?

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Disclaimer: I believe this is the right subforum, don’t kill me if it’s not :slight_smile: Also, feel free to take out the link pluggage, but these are all genuinely useful. And I likely left a lot of awesome sites out, sorry, I’m only human!

2

The main problem with what you suggested would be the amount of memery needed to store it, not to mention bandwith and the amount of traffic it would get. Also we could easily have things double posted or some bot spam it with useless uploads.

3

Wow, that’s a whole something-load of links there! :ahh:

I do agree that after some thought, it can be daunting. My suggestion? Make great use of the FIRST Wiki.
http://wiki.chiefdelphi.com/index.php/Main_Page

It’s already there, and somewhat updated. It would take some time, but we could get a dedicated group together (preferably start before Kick-Off) to go gather all of the information we can, then put it in that one central location.

For pages that are web-versions of documents, we can upload the original document to make it available for download.

4

NEMO has also been thinking about this challenge and is working on a first draft, trying to organize a list to help (at least for FRC for 2009).
What I am trying to figure out is which categories make sense so it’s just not a long list. Any suggestions?

5

Don’t worry, just hold tight; there’s projects in the pipeline to address these issues.

6

I think the bandwidth and memory for all these documents would pale in comparison to hosting hundreds of video segments, which is already being done. So I don’t think that should be the issue. Or at least, we’re only working in theory right now :slight_smile: But valid points that would need to be worked out no matter what.

Yes, I’ve seen FIRSTwiki, and that could work. The way mediawiki manages versions of files seems nice. But it seems right now people only use it to update their own team pages AFAIK. It’s been there for years, but it never seems to have gained momentum :frowning:

Ideally it wouldn’t be listed under categories but rather tags, which are much more flexible. But in the interim before we get a good solution, I think the categories on http://firstdev.wpi.edu/cgi-bin/index.cgi?n=Portal are pretty good:

* Portal
* Competitions
* Electrical
* Fundraising
* Leadership
* Mechanical
* Outreach
* Programming

May I join in? Because I’ve done a lot of thinking on this, and am curious as to what ideas others have. I just don’t want to be reinventing the wheel :slight_smile:

A possible idea as suggested by a fellow team member (Tanner @CD) is to create some sort of webapp around del.icio.us [feeds or api]. In this case, creating a delicious account specifically for this purpose, and using the api to create a webpage where (probably registered) users can submit links and descriptions to that one account. What this removes is the popularity function, so no easy way to sort quality of links (or perhaps, rate using “star” tags e.g. “***” as a tag?). Team #s can be implemented like CD-media does, same for revision date, etc. And if wanted to, could do tags like “category_Programming”. And same for licensing (“license_Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic”? ). There’d be a lot of kinks, like how to protect against malicious users (how do we ensure that that really is the correct license?). Brainstorming out loud here.

However, ideally for me, we could let the document originators or just helpful souls manually extract the data from all these documents and stick them online so I don’t have to download the files (and thereby forget where I got them) in the first place.

Yes, this is coming from someone has almost zilch programming experience, and no, I’m not content to just hold tight and wait. :slight_smile: Inefficiency like this (not being able to quickly discern which resources are well-executed or up-to-date and find new resources) annoys me.

7

Wasn’t WPI working on a major repository project? I attended a seminar in Atlanta this year and thats what I thought the intent was of their effort.

8

See Art Dutra’s post above. I believe it recently finished a closed beta test.

9

Wow! Sometimes my intuition needs to be fine tuned!

Art: current role = college student, current location = Worcester.
WPI = college, location = Worcester.

Hypothesis #1 Art is going to WPI!!!
Hypothesis #2 “Project in the pipeline” is the same one I saw the presentation on in Atlanta!

Its all fitting together now!
(And interestingly enough, it’s one of the links that Nancy included!)

10

I think FIRST has actually taken a crack at this themselves here:
http://www.usfirst.org/community/frc/content.aspx?id=478

Its probably not every topic and definitely not every link that you have, and maybe could use a bit of organization, but its the right direction I think…

And the first thing I thought of when I started to read your post is “isnt that what the President’s Circle is doing?” Our team isnt in the president’s circle, so Im not entirely clear on their charter, but it seems like they are doing a lot of that legwork here:
http://www.usfirst.org/community/frc/content.aspx?id=7006

The FIRST website has definitely collected a lot of the good & reputable resources, and they are much better organized & presented than in years past.

11

NEMO is putting the finishing touches on a “reference sheet” filled with links, incorporating a lot of the information listed above. We hope to finish by next week.
In addition, there are categories on:
Where to send questions for official answers.
Official sites for rules and clarifications.
Team manuals
History of FIRST
Advice from other teams

The intent is to group these links in an easier to scan format, to help make the road map a little easier to follow, to all the valuable resources out there. This road map is not meant to replace any other resource currently being worked on or out there.

12

Ah, sorry for the late reply.

Thanks for the links, I took a look at all of those.

Ah, closed beta? Oops, I signed up for an account >_< I think it got deleted so it all works out. They somehow managed to email the people on TIMS for our team though to verify me (I think that was the list they used). I didn’t expect that, I got a questioning email from The Adults of our team u_u

Anyway, I’m not looking so much for a definitive list or collection of resources in one spot (in which case, the forthcoming NEMO list sounds like an excellent list), so much as I’m looking for some way to attach metadata to all the resources that are out there; this system that would accommodate resources that don’t exist yet., as it would be more dynamic (continuously updated) than a static list (such as on USFIRST). The people who actually use the resources (for instance me) can contribute to the metadata, e.g. comments, ratings, or notes.

Also, not so much “link organizing” I suppose as document organizing. Version control, or something.
For instance, when I research one thing extensively, it seems that some of the newer powerpoint files will draw from previous versions, or from ppt files on similar topic from other people (or perhaps they just happen to use the same pics). Frustrating trying to merge similar documents, esp. if they’re all huge files.
There’s also distinction between documents used for presentations (just supporting material), and documents used to teach yourself. Or documents for presentations that have speaker notes attached that you can teach yourself from. But you can’t tell from filenames.
As stated before, many of the presentations are in PDF format which is less amenable to reuse.
And a lot of the documents are missing info on whether it’s okay to reuse / remix them. So, copyright info.

On a closer look, firstdev.wpi.edu has a lot of useful functions, so do ignore my rambling brainstorming post earlier.
Thinktank(?) has:
tags (well actually they are implemented like gmail labels, but with sub-labels, actually that should be plenty flexible for our situation),
capability to have online version of a document (not sure if it supports pics? Also not as supportive for online versions of slide-based docs),
multiple (community) rating,
version control (for the online version, not the attached documents. Although I suppose you could just keep on attaching documents with the name specifying the revision),
metadata for URLs (to do so, create a TT page around an URL).
A point of confusion there, the “assets” can be the document version(s?) of the online page, or links to outside resources such as you might find at the end of wiki page.
Actually the URL part is a little bit confusing since you can attach multiple URLs to one ThinkThank page, so the metadata is for the collection of URLs rather than each URL. And in fact a on WWW single URL is for page that can have multiple documents on it, so again not so much URL organizing as document / individual resource organizing.
Thinkthank does have editing, but not really commenting capability. So it’s more suited for collecting resources on the site than applying metadata to resources outside the site.

Uhm. My brain hurts so I’ll stop there. I’m not sure what I’m talking about anymore. X__x

13

FRC 2009=>Road Map to Useful Links from NEMO

posted
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2176?