This site was designed to aggregate the knowledge of the FRC Community by providing people a categorical and keyword driven search of team knowledge. Basically - if you have a question - you will be able to search and find the teams that have that knowledge. You can then contact them and ask them questions via our contact form.
We are still in Beta and are in need of people to register and submit a listing either for their teams or individually. Try to make sure to include an image. We do not have our category system fully listed yet and plan on growing the list based on the number of usages of individual keywords.
Unless I’m mistaken, FIRST Thoughts is more or less a site of videos of people’s . . . thoughts about FIRST stuff. Useful info in some of them, but I don’t think its intent is to be very interactive, which I think is the point of the Pit Crew site. Pit Crew (correct me if I’m wrong) looks to be like a repository of mentorship helping to bridge teams. It is less a destination of consumables and more a social network / networking utility.
Sounds like it has a lot of potential! I’m registering/signing up…
I think how much use this gets could be dramatically limited if few teams are informed about this. Perhaps once a number of people have registered on FRC Pit Crew, you guys could ask FIRST to mention it in one of the upcoming announcement e-mails to all teams?
Seems to me that for many questions (i.e. ‘is this strategy or implementation legal?’, ‘please review/comment on my manipulator/drivetrain design.’) Chief Delphi will still be a better avenue because you can get a variety of opinions and you’re not limited to one individual’s response time/availability… FRC Pit Crew is probably better served for something closer to a ‘rent-a-mentor’ service where some ongoing help is needed on a team that has a ‘gap’ in experience.
Our goal in creating the site was to establish a new avenue for Mentorship that involved a more one-on-one interaction base than CD offers. What I am hoping is that we eventually have enough teams registered that any question could be legitimately answered through a phone/email/video-conference type contact for the expressed reason of increasing team interaction.
I am reminded of all of the times that our team made contact to others for help and in many of those cases have developed long-term relationships and friendships that aid us during competitions when CD is not as readily available.