Today I’m so excited to announce The Compass Alliance - a project aimed to help FRC teams along their journey. This is a project we have been working on for awhile with a consortium of incredible teams from around the world. Our goal is to improve team retention by removing barriers and helping teams wherever they are in their FIRST journey.
The Compass Alliance strives to provide short and long-term help and resources to support you and your team. If you’re wondering how to re-image your radio at 2am, looking for a field/machine shop in your area, trying to create a sustainable team structure, or just want some resources, The Compass Alliance aims to help you find your path. To view all the services currently available, please visit www.TheCompassAlliance.org
This is a long-term project for our teams. It requires a huge amount of input and data from our large FRC community. We’re launching at this point in time because we are going to need help to make The Compass Alliance what we envision it to be. In the simplest terms, we’re attempting to consolidate, streamline and organize a vast pool of resources available to new and struggling teams. What you see is the next step in a long road we expect to pull in hundreds of teams and thousands of different resources. With that said, we welcome your help and feedback, find out how to get involved here: www.thecompassalliance.org/ways-to-help
Additionally, we realize that team retention is a many-faceted issue with no one “magic bullet” solution. The group will be running longer-term research to identify why teams discontinue. Many of the resources and tools we currently offer came from working with Regional Directors from around the world to determine what rookie and struggling teams need to succeed.
This is an awesome program put together by some awesome teams! How will the help provided to newer teams through this site compare to that of firsthelpnow? Is it connected? A replacement? A totally different thing? Especially cause there is some team overlap, how will I know who to reach out to at 2 am when both sites make jokes about it? Thanks to all of the teams for putting together these great resources!
How are you going to reach the teams that need this? I like to think (and am fairly confident that) us CD denizens and Discord members, us FUN-watchers and TBA-stalkers, kinda know what’s up. Not to say that my team (or any team) is beyond learning from these resources, but you say your target is “new and struggling teams.” From what I’ve seen (in general, but not a hard-and-fast rule) is that these teams are not on CD, they aren’t looking at other teams’ websites.
How do you plan to spread this to as many teams as possible?
FIRST Help Now will continue to operate as a 24/7 resource for teams that need it! Please make sure teams you work with know about the effort!
Thanks for the Kudos!
We are actually announcing The Compass Alliance at the Mentors Without Borders conference in Australia right now! There are rookie teams from all over Australia at the conference, and teams from China, Taiwan and other countries watching the live stream where we announced this resource. You can watch the stream live here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlNKeGkOgps
That said, a few teams cannot possibly reach every FRC team, we need anyone who is willing to share this resource with teams (new and old) they know! An easy way to help is connect with The Compass Alliance on social media and share it with your friends!
This is incredible and something needed in the community for a while.
Thanks to all the teams who put this together and already offered a personal and a 3476 helping hand to this!
Major props to Mike and everyone else involved. Looking through this stuff there’s a lot here that would have helped 5940 when we were just starting out.
Great to have this resource for teams moving forwards!
As part of the planning and development up to where we are now, The Compass Alliance teams have been working directly with almost all of the RDs in the world. This was 1. To get an important survey infront of teams and 2. to check and “prime the pump” about the effectiveness of that communication network. In about a weeks time we were able to generate something like 50-60 extensive survey responses from 1st, 2nd and 3rd year teams. This may not seem like a massive number on a global scale, but by our metrics it was a very successful communication method.
As The Compass Alliance project grows and evolves we will push it to become a ‘household name’. Not in the context of recognition, but in the context of it becoming the standard place to point teams. We think the key to success is by building this WITH the “Chief Delphi” teams (teams who are connected, plugged-in and already supporting) while simultaneously pushing and communicating through the more classic FIRST channels.
On behalf of everyone involved in creating The Compass Alliance, I extend our sincere thank you. I also reach out to you to keep helping us build this. We want meaningful content plugged in. We want to curate paths for teams to follow that are tailor made to their own struggles. We want any struggling or young team to be able to ask a question and get an answer, and we want them to understand the amazing things that can come from a reciprocal Tag Team with a vet.
We are obviously ensuring full credit is being given to submitting teams whose content is hosted. We have some special plans to unite all of the teams involved in this together as well. I’ll save the details for a later date
The ambition for this project is very high and we need everyone reading these messages to help make it real.
This is something that will change the dynamic of hundreds of new teams. Heck this will, if set up and managed correctly, will change FIRST in general.
I have a question to those running it though. Is there any way to get single mentors involved? other than the call center. Like emails that would be sent to a group of registered mentors with certain skill tags that they could put in when they register. the emails would be open to any of the mentors to answer and then the team could receive a pool of advice instead of a one answer thing.
It’s just a thought but I will definitely bring this up to the rookie team I am mentoring this year, and I really hope this takes off in popularity because access to this type of knowledge at any level is game-changing.
Great question and great insights! The teams involved in creating TCA did a lot of research and surveying to try and find out how teams who are thriving as 1st, 2nd and 3rd years got the support that has made them successful. That being said, we definitely are going to continue to tweak and change things as certain resources present themselves.
When you apply to be a Guide for a Tag Team, you can just select 1 as the number of mentors able to help. If you prefer to not be associated with your team, fill out these team fields declaring yourself an Independent Contributor. Additionally you can tick off which disciplines you can help with. The link to apply to be a Guide is here: https://www.thecompassalliance.org/assist-tag-teams
We’re already working on improving this process based on your feedback!
Once approved as a Guide, you’ll be plugged into the network of all the other Guides. We’re hoping as Tag Teams evolve, the Guides will be able to communicate with each other and help us refine the process of whats working and what is not.
Looking forward to getting you onboard - I think you see the vision we’re going after. We’ve got a long way to go, but we need lots of positive energy and drive at this stage to continue its path to success.
To echo what was touched on before, this is absolutely fantastic. The idea of a centralized hub for workshops, resources, and mentorship has been a concept I’m sure many of us (myself included) have only left as simple ideas, but this group has fully grown the idea to become a reality.
Is there any way for small teams like 3309 to get involved? We have our own internal workshops and presentations which are probably peanuts compared to the ones already posted, but they’re basically collecting dust in the 3309 Google Drive as we speak.
Another question,
have the videos/ resources been watched/ approved ( don’t know if thats the right word) before posting online to ensure its a sufficient resource?
Or was the goal more quantity over a smaller quality bunch?
Thanks!
Absolutely! Any experienced team of any size can be a great Tag Team Guide. In fact, part of the pairing process is to look at team similarities like size, location and sponsors to pair teams who have been through it before. There’s not many 80 member teams clinging for dear life remember…
For your resources think in similar terms. We are looking for content to cover many unique situations for teams. We’ve all seen dozens of drive train presentations… But maybe yours focuses on executing one without CNC equipment? That’s interesting! Tell us that!!
The resources and videos posted have all been selected and watched or in some cases recently created to fit specific needs. The focus is definitely on quality and usability. I’m sure many of us on CD are aware how much content is out there… It’s alot!
In the near future we’ll launch our first guided paths which are designed to walk teams through these resources just like a curriculum. The hope is this really accelerates team knowledge and makes the site a must-use.
This is awesome. Wave is excited to help in any way we can. Already applying to be a Tag Team and a Help Hub.
My one critique of the site though is that while filling out the forms to apply to help the sections that have check boxes where you can check multiple the field gets highlighted in blue and the text is then grey and its near impossible to read.
Edit: Also can’t seem to access the site on my teams school district network…
