I don’t know if this is just happening to me, but our troops activities (Camping) are not being transferred to IA2. We have to enter them in both environments. 1st it is an Event in the Scoutbook calendar and then once attendance has been recorded we have to go into IA2 and record the event and select the participants again.
The Scoutbook calendar is not yet connected to the logs in Internet Advancement. You need to enter the events twice.
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From a process perspective, the Scoutbook calendar is about notifying your unit of upcoming events, and the Activity Logs are about documenting past events.
When it’s been looked at in the past, there were a whole lot of unexpected complexity in the model for linking calendar events to activity logs. Not programming issues, but boots-on-the-ground issues like how do automate the participation for the activity logs when your campout has:
- Three kids in marching band that won’t be there Friday night, but will show up Saturday morning
- One kid with travel soccer that will be there Friday night, leave at 10am Saturday morning, then return Saturday night?
- One kid with catechism at 8am on Sunday morning, so he leaves Saturday after dinner.
- Two kids that go to the campout, but skip the 5-miler to work on a merit badge instead?
Clearly, that can’t be covered automatically, because there are so many variations in what the Scouts are doing. While it might be possible to create the camping event and the hiking event automatically from the calendar (maybe), it’s not really saving any significant time for the adult updating the logs.
EDIT: me fix grammar. me make words good someday.
Hey Steve,
Thanks for your comments they were very helpful in providing me with some context as to the why the Scoutbook calendar is not synchronized with Internet Advancement. The other boots-on-the-ground considerations must be the volunteers that must now double or quadruple handle (in the case of B and G troops) calendars, activities and attendees. Wouldn’t there be a more streamlined way to resolve your case studies within approval process of Internet Advancement rather the burdening volunteers with multiple data entry in Scoutbook and Internet Advancement?
Well, there’s probably some utility to creating the events in IA2 from the calendar, my experience so far, there’s not going to be any great improvement in efficiency. Especially considering that the BSA considered boy and girl Troops to be independent, so you cannot create one event in either system to cover both units.
With that said, after doing half a dozen entries in the new Activity Logs, I find that it rarely takes more than a few (less than five) minutes to create an event, enter the participants, and approve it…
So, in my experience so far the process is:
- (prior to event) PLC confirms event details.
- (prior to event) Scribe creates/edits calendar entry in Scoutbook.
- (during event) SPL/ASPL tracks attendance and participation.
- (after event) Key 3 or Key 3 delegate creates entry (or entries) in IA2 Activity Logs, based on SPL/ASPL records.
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