The Blue Alliance is going to be releasing some of the code that drives The Blue Alliance site as an open source project. It is our hope that community members can use our code to learn from and set up their own versions of the site for fun. Perhaps some people will even come up with betters ways to do some of the things that The Blue Alliance does and will contribute improvements back to the code base.
Basically, there are a few goals for this initiative:
- Let anyone who wants to see the entire guts of a web site. Personally, I developed my interest in web development in high school by tinkering with stuff, and I hope other people can be inspired to poke and tinker.
- Ensure that if everyone responsible for The Blue Alliance dropped off the face of the Earth at once, someone else would be able to set it back up.
- Let other people contibute code, since we don’t have infinite resources to make everything as awesome as it could be.
We’re going to formally announce this initiative in our blog in the next week or two, but here is a sneak preview: http://firstwiki.net/index.php/TheBlueAllianceOpenSource
It’s not perfect, but the philosophy here is that it’s better to release early and release often than wait until everything is 100% perfect. Please feel free to set it up, try it out, and let us know if there is anything we should document better to make it easier to get rolling.