Hello, and welcome back to This Week at Open Robotics HQ!
Did you know we have 53 sponsors (and counting) for ROSCon Global? And that each one of those sponsors needs assistance with logistics and planning and the like? And all of them are keen to learn more about, get intros to, and work with the community? Just keeping everything straight is practically a full-time job. We’re especially happy about how many OSRA members are increasing their community support by sponsoring ROSCon Global! 
Let’s not forget that there are nine regional ROSCons that are coming up in the next few months. While the local teams are doing most of this organizing, they still need help and coordination from the home office. Some of that coordination is setting up introductions and connections to people and companies in their regions, strengthening the network of folks who support open source robotics.
One of those regional events is happening right now: ROSCon JP has started and features a keynote from Tully! Sure, he’s not Open Robotics staff but he is family and in these parts we celebrate each others’ successes. The other keynote is from Prof. Bill Smart, who’s been around ROS for about as long as almost anyone.
All of the AI for Industry Challenge submissions are in! There were 25 of them, and judging this round was as difficult as you’d expect. Not least in that difficulty was making sure each submission got the attention it deserves.
Some new projects kicked off this past week, including initial work on updating the OSRA website. It’s going to include things like a page to guide people who want to contribute (with a lot of help from the Contributing to ROS documentation that just landed), as well as a job board for our OSRA members.
We’re also looking at refreshing our social media handling. As a part of that, we’re working on updating the Open Robotics YouTube channel so we can feature work by community members.
These are some of the highlights from this past week for your Open Robotics leadership team.