Progressive Automotive X PRIZE Forum Board Re-Vamp

We are in the final stages of reviewing application and are now beginning to turn our focus to initiatives that can support the pool of registered teams. While the final announcement of accepted teams is still a few weeks away, we are working to launch a few initiatives around this same time. One of these projects includes the re-launch of the Progressive Automotive X PRIZE Forum board.

We took down the Forum board a few weeks ago, as it had begun to lose relevancy with our change in focus. More importantly, the application lacked the robust security that we needed to keep spammers from interfering with the dialogue. We will be launching a new board in the coming weeks, and as we formulate topics, we would love to hear from you. What do you want to discuss? What do you want to hear about from the teams? And, teams, what do you want to be able to share or ask for in a public setting?

Our goal is to make the new Forum board a useful (and spam-free) resource that benefits open dialogue amongst the public and our competing teams. We know that there were issues with the last board, so here is your chance to let us know what you believe can be done to make this new board better.

Comments

[Greg Locock]

Running a successful forum requires some effort from the admins. Specifically they need to ensure that spammers and other vandals are suppressed. This requires daily attention.

As an interested observer, I'd like to see any discussion of a team's ideas, but I rather doubt that at this stage in the comp that they are much open to alternatives, by now their ideas should be almost finalised and being fine tuned.

[Bethann Buddenbaum]

Greg:

I agree completely about the need for oversight and will admit freely that we were unable to give the last forum the daily oversight that it required. Our team has grown substantially, which makes staying involved easier. Plus, this new forum has something the old one didn't -- the ability to pre-approve every post. This serves two purposes: 1) obviously, it cuts down on spam, and 2) as every post is pushed to us for approval, we can ensure that it is noted if it requires a comment.

Believe it or not, there are a number of teams who are still hashing through or refining their ideas. Red Light Racing actually has a place on their website that asks for suggestions to issues they are experiencing. I don't know that any team would have been willing to deviate any from their own idea, even two years ago. They are in the competition because they believe their idea can win. That said, I think you will find many will be open to exploring how to make their idea even better.

[Russ Atkinson]

Most of us followers probably have a favorite team. Mine is Aptera. I would like to see comments from the team or from those close fans and followers as to what the particular challenges will be for my team, who their competition is, and how they are trying to address those challenges. I'm sure some secrecy is necessary for tactical reasons, but a discussion of strong and weak points of each of the teams will build anticipation and speculation as with a good athletic competition. Of course we're all winners if the best green vehicles are discovered, improved, and given deserved publicity, but let's have fun the way fans everywhere do in approaching a big match-up.