How we Open Alliance
Purpose: Your blog should be informative and helpful to other teams. Consider what other teams want to learn about your robot design and build process. Avoid using jargon that other teams may not understand, and avoid sharing fluff.
What to post:
Here are some ideas!
- Design process: Your brainstorming sessions, robot ideas in the early build season, CAD drawings, and simulations.
- Testing: Instrumental in early build season- prototype videos, videos of old bots interacting with new game pieces, etc
- Problems/obstacles you’re facing and what you’re trying to fix them
- Lessons learned: Things that went well, things that didn’t, and things you would do differently next time.
- Posts you can make consistently like event recaps and weekly design recaps
- Training: Odds are that if you are training people on your team about something, someone else is as well.
When to post:
- We run our build blogs based on the calendar year. This way all content for a single game will be located in the same thread. So our 2025 blog will start in January. This also allows people just coming for our early season content can find it quickly.
- The Open Alliance recommends posting at least once a week. Posting short blogs frequently is preferred to posting long blogs every few weeks or months. Posting more often early in the season is more useful as those are the most critical days for prototyping.
- Posts during the early build and competition seasons are especially useful and engaging to other teams!
Format:
Use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up your text and make it easy to scan. Include images and videos to illustrate your points.
Feedback:
Encourage readers to leave feedback and ask questions. More importantly, always answer questions people leave on your blog.
Good things:
- Photos and videos. At least half of your post should visually be photos and videos.
- Not sharing all the details. Choosing to leave everything simple 1) cuts down on your word count/blocks of text and 2) encourages people to ask questions, turning the blog into a discussion. For example, in this post, we said we liked the “information diet” rule, people asked about it, and we sent several more messages about it. We could have chosen to elaborate fully in the first post, but it would have added several paragraphs of text and discouraged further questions.
- Templates aren’t needed (they can make posts repetitive), but they can help start the writing process. For example, we roughly follow this template for event recaps.
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Sharing resources on your blog
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Having a section dedicated to all of your active resources, such as CAD, GitHub, photo library, etc, will make your blog the one-stop shop for anyone looking for more info about your robot
Spectrum 3847 | Build Blog 2023 -
Draft your build blog on a Google doc and use Smart Spell Checkers such as Grammarly to get rid of any errors and to make it easy to understand.
Things to avoid:
- Large blocks of text. Instead, chop off unneeded sentences, rearrange them into bullet points or small paragraphs, and use helpful pictures to break up the text.
- “Spoilers”/Hide Details. Some people just won’t read it. Here’s an example of what we mean.
Summary
Secret info only a few people will read.
- Avoid posting mundane content. A whole post that can be summarized as “We kept building the robot” isn’t valuable for the reader and will cause people to stop returning. Keeping posts interesting and useful will encourage readers to come back.
- Ignoring Feedback: If readers take the time to comment or ask questions, avoid ignoring them. Engagement is key to building a successful build blog.