When you make the decision to build a Creative Robotix based robot, you are not just choosing another maker project. Rather, you are also becoming part of a community of fellow robot builders; the Creative-Robotix community. This is a community where people share an interest in building robots, and harbour dreams about what wondrous things the future may have in store.  Collaboration among developers is supported by blog entries, design files and code uploaded through the Creative-Robotix web pages.

Some of you are also part of Creative-Science activities where we use something called Science Fiction Prototyping to discuss visions that we hope might shape better futures. Others of you are more interested in the design aspects making new robot functionalities or appearances.

In all these activities something you will all share is being part of our community, one where we share ideas, designs, information and helping each other freely, since this is an open source venture.

Community doesn’t stop with the robot designers but extends into the robots themselves as, because your robot can be network-aware, that means that the robot you build can communicate with other Creative-Robotix robots. We do this through connections to the cloud, extending the notion of community and collaboration into the world of robots. Imagine a world where your robot was sharing, learning and collaborating with others, not just locally based robots, but ones across the globe!  In keeping with a community spirit and cloud-of-things principles, we would hope that your robots would not just be stand-alone creatures but will be social robots, having names and using the Internet to communicate with each other.

The procedure is simple, you submit details about yourself, your school or your group along with details of your project to creativerobotixreg@creative-science.eu (including links to the source materials) and, if it is relevant to our community, we will list it on the Creative-Robotix website. In return, you can endorse your project as being ‘An Affiliated Member of Creative-Robotix Community’ and join our movement, using our blog and getting early notification on community news (including coming developments). We aim for this to be a community-driven enterprise so your voices and contributions will be valued.

Creative-Robotix wants to encourage synergy between people interested in supporting our goals by further developing our robot platforms and teaching materials and bringing these methods to as many children as possible. Thus, if you are interested in working with us, we would like to invite you to become an affiliated partner. An affiliated partner agrees to abide by our guiding principles and the principles of the Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike Creative Commons license:

• Open Source & Design – making your designs available free of charge to the Creative–Robotix Community and not use them for commercial purposes.
• Compatibility – making your design useable by other Creative-Robotix users through maintaining compatibility of tools, materials and vision.
• Registration – Listing your designs on the Creative-Robotix website, together with links to the design source material, so the information is available to all our community.

By joining the Creative-Robotix community, there is the potential for you to go beyond simply building a single robot for yourself but, rather, helping to create a growing community of human-friendly social robot’s, designed and shared by the community, evolving and improving with each contribution and iteration. Thus we encourage you to use our blog to share your questions, ideas and designs.

We wish you “Happy Imagining, Happy Creating & Happy Building !”