FIRST Community,
One of my students had the idea to get the FIRST community together during one of the slower times of the year to enrich programming ideas and software. His letter to the FIRST community is below. He doesn’t have a deep CD profile so he asked me to post this for him.
Dear FIRST® Teams,
Summer of FIRST ® is an Open-Source, long distance collaboration project that is looking for programmers from FIRST ® teams who are interested in developing their skills and contributing to the FIRST ® community. If your team is already planning an off-season project involving software that may be used by the community, or you are interested in writing software in the off-season for the FIRST ® Robotics Competition, you may be interested in enrolling your team in Summer of FIRST ®.
Mission Statement:
Our goal is to inspire the creation and expansion of Open-Source software for FIRST ® robotics, through providing an engaging and industry relevant environment, with incentives for quality contributions. Through participation in this project those involved will improve their skills in Software Engineering, as well as other Computer Science related fields.
What is expected of participating teams:
• Participants will have a team representative enroll their team through the form found on our website (www.SummerOfFIRST.org/teamsignup)
• Participants will be notified before July 1st as to the acceptance of their project, via email
• Participating teams will have email addresses created for them at SummerOfFIRST.org
• SourceForge accounts will be made for participating teams. It will be the responsibility of teams to store their up-to-date code online. SourceForge allows subversioning, using SVN, Git and Mercurial. Please use SVN or Git for Summer of FIRST® projects.
• Two mandatory code-reviews will be scheduled during the project. Teams are responsible for scheduling convenient dates for the code-reviews with Summer of FIRST ® staff.
• At the end of the project, awards will be recognized during a live webcast. We will also evaluate the progress achieved during the summer and what we would like to see accomplished next year. More details on where and when this event will be hosted will be available in the future.
For more information please visit our website: www.SummerOfFIRST.org. For specific questions that cannot be answered on the website, teams can contact a staff member:
Tyler Pawlaczyk: tyler_at_SummerOfFIRST.org
CD Username armgeek
Regards,
Summer of FIRST ® Organizer
Tyler Pawlaczyk
FRC Team 340
One little stylistic note: the ® symbol is unnecessary.
The holder of the registered trademark is well advised to use the symbol conspicuously (though not excessively), because in case of trademark litigation, its use will be favourably construed as an attempt to defend the mark against infringement.
For you, there’s no duty to do so (because it’s not your trademark) and your noninfringing use of it is irrelevant. If you still want to tell the world that “FIRST” is a registered trademark of FIRST, then feel free to do so—but use your judgment as to how many repetitions are beneficial before it starts detracting from your stylistic efforts.
One suggestion would be to use GitHub instead of SourceForge. I find it easier to navigate projects/code through GitHub, and there are already tons of FRC teams/projects on GitHub.
Also, what sort of projects are you looking for? The examples you have are very robot-code specific projects. Do you want people to submit only robot-specific projects?
I have created an organization on github, I’ll talk to Mr. Rees about getting the post up top edited to reflect this.
We are open to all projects that benefit FIRST. They can be robot code, or a scouting database, or whatever. Over here at 340, we’re working on a FIRST-optimized image for the Raspberry Pi, not exactly robot, however it still benefits FIRST as a whole.
Thank you for clearing this up! I’ve been a bit confused over whether or not to use the Registered Trademark symbol, and you cleared it up for me. Much appreciated.
Thanks, that means a lot!
In other news, I am working on securing much cooler prizes for teams, for instance Arduinos and Raspberry Pis for participants, in addition to T-shirts. If you’re any sort of geek, this makes it even more incentive to participate!
Excuse the double post, but I just wanted to congratulate the following teams on signing-up to complete a project this summer. Teams 178, 340, 1622, 2220, 2587, 4334 and 4343 will all be developing software to benefit the community (as well as earn prizes for their teams)! If you feel like you’re missing out, head on over to www.summeroffirst.org and sign-up.
You might consider a posting in the Java forum … one of the projects everyone there keeps talking about is getting a larger group of people working together to get a Java ‘simulator’ finished and of product quality - so that one does not need a robot (or a cRIO on a board) to develop and minimally run software during build season. I know a couple of people started various ones - but this seems like the perfect opportunity to bring this to closure. You just need to find someone to oversee it - but one of the existing attempts make take that on.
Both students and mentors and are allowed to participate in Summer of FIRST. So, either way it doesn’t matter! Thanks for asking that, I was waiting to see if that would come up.
