[Robotgroup] Armadillocon etc.

[TomD]

We could try another model. We host the venue and people bring in their
bots to show at our venue. It would be much more interactive. RoboFest was
sort of 'look at all this neat stuff we built'. How about making it 'lets see
what you can do' Things like Dorkbot and Maker Fair are going that way.
We could have a contest for x pairs of comped tickets and a table.
Rate the bots on technical, aesthetics, open sourceness, uniqueness.
The top bots get in free, but there is still space for others to come in
and be demonstrated.

The Holiday animatronics could be it's own show, there are a lot of people
working on this around town, some in groups, but I'll bet a lot more are going
it alone. We could provide a show where people could network. Also for a modest
table fee, vendors could sell items as well, sort of the Gun and Knife show model,
this could be a Bot and microcontroller show. The venue always makes bank, that
would be us, we would use that as seed money to put together kits for schools
or have grants based on proposals. Of course that's a lot of work, I think
that's not going to happed right away, but with a whole mot more people in the
group, it could.

That's the real crux of things, where do we want to go with RG?
Sure, most of us will build or do this stuff on our own anyway.
Is the Group there to promote to the community at large to get involved in building
bots and things, or is it way for us to showcase the things we've done?
There's a mission statement, but that's also 15+ years old, does it need to be
updated or changed with today's reality. Technologically speaking, the world is
a very different place than it was in 1989. What was very new and cool in 1989-1995
is very different than what is new and cool now in 2006. The biggest difference
between the Robot Group and most other robotics groups is that we build robots for Art.

The art angle is something that is pretty unique to RG. The debates on what is Art
can go on forever, but can best be summed up by "I know Art when I see it, and that's Art"
" What the heck is THAT?" also applies. It's an approach to robotics that I don't
see very much, if at all in magazines or people's websites. It's some thing that if it
doesn't make us unique within the robotics community, it makes us rare.
Certainly for Texas, there's SRL and The Seemen in the Bay Area. But those are pretty
much the vision of one artist, the RG is more of an artists collective.