Internet advancement permissions

I am the Unit Advancement chair for my Troop (as shown in Scoutbook). Our Troopmaster added this designation to my profile in my.scouting.org, but it won’t show up in my.scouting.org or allow me to record any advancement in Scoutbook. How do I get these permissions to actually show up? Note, we use a different platform from advancement (Troopmaster), so I need to report things via Internet Advancement.
Thanks

2 Likes

Until my.scouting.org shows your position as Unit Advancement Chair, you won’t be able to edit any advancement. This is a position that is cleared from the Organization Security Manager (OSM) at every recharted, and one of the Key 3 members needs to re-assign it. If you’ve recently rechartered, or if you’re just now becoming active again after the coronapocalypse, your role as Advancement Chair may have been cleared automatically. Or, when your SM updated your role, it didn’t save for some reason.

I recommend you ask your Scoutmaster to double check the OSM to make sure your position was updated, and the update “stuck”.

This “feature” of letting Scoutbook be the Wild West when it comes to adult unit roles is a HUGE support burden. The powers that be need to put their first class badges on and have one source of truth - my.scouting. Until then, good luck getting the masses to figure it out Scouter at a time.

1 Like

Unfortunately, my.scouting is wrong near 100% of the time for my unit. At recharter 2019 our unit had 20 registered leaders and 60 scouts. We now have five scouts who have paid dues and five leaders. The Pack looks like nothing like recharter, unit, and district commissioners are fooled because the commissioner tools pull from my.scouting. Yet in reality, we are in a crisis of not being able to recharter due to COVID-19, increase in dues, and military late PCS season. Ironically Scoutbook is the most accurate depiction of our unit as I change the numbers daily as scouts leave, and now adding new scouts. I have no power to edit my.scouting, but I can edit portions of my pack in Scoutbook. If BSA insists on this faux reality then we will continue to have issues.

Similar principal in governance whereas the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution gives all remaining powers to the states and to the people, so should BSA give powers to Scouters to manage their own units rather than try to micromanage from the top.

1 Like

The BSA is insisting on getting the official records correct. As long as units and councils continue to not update the official records, units and commissioners will continue have problems. It is pretty easy - fix the system of record vs the easy wrong.

1 Like

A simple example is I have a Wolf Scout who has been in Scouting for two years. His name is spelled wrong in my.scouting and in IA 2.0. I am able to edit his name in Scoutbook so when we print awards his name is spelled correctly. I have no power to edit in my.scouting or IA 2.0 so it stays wrong. Often like our Council Far East Council which covers about half the planet the council registrar is in a whole different country, so sending in corrections is not that easy Ironically it seems the work overload help desk, BSA decided to downsize and push the support roles down to Council, we can only hope this trend continues and District will have some control and maybe even units.

@ScottMarbut Fixing a misspelled name for a Scout is usually a pretty easy fix. Can you send your Registrar an e-mail requesting the change?

1 Like

Honestly I never look at the roster in my.scouting.org. I always use Scoutbook. I only noticed the mistake when I logged into IA 2.0, then I checked myscouting and it was misspelled there as well, then I had the Eureka moment and knew why IA 2.0 was a complete mess compared to the meticulous care I examine the Pack from Scoutbook, which by the is graphically, and much easier to use than IA 2.0.

I imagine I would need the Scouts BSA Number and full name and DOB and then send it to the FEC register to fix.

1 Like

Choosing to ignore my.scouting will continue to cause issues.

1 Like

From National’s perspective, people have paid for the whole year. So, I doubt they’ll create a membership system that allows you to drop members mid-year.

At the risk of wandering further afield…

Which leads back to the issues of relying on my.scouting. BSA national’s position is that they’ve paid for a year of membership. The family’s or scouter’s position is that they are no longer participating in the unit and wish to be removed from both notifications of activities and access to their personal data. The unit has historically been able to satisfy this by ending the membership for the youth/adult in Scoutbook. If an adult takes on additional functional roles, whether registered for them or not, the unit is able to accommodate that in Scoutbook. That’s not to say that adults shouldn’t register at all, simply that the BSA’s position of one-person-one-position is unworkable for many units. Is the solution to an administratively-created problem (arbitrary restrictions on number of roles a leader can fill) really to eliminate functionality that allows us to deliver the program to youth? That seems like poor decision-making to me.

1 Like

The master data is at my.scouting.org. If that’s not correct, everything else is going to have problems. If you’re not checking that when roster changes happen, as @Matt.Johnson said up-thread, you’re going to have problems.

When a family PCSes, you can unapprove their memberships in Scoutbook, and they’ll no longer receive any updates or emails. If you delete the connections from the Scout to all of the unit leaders, nobody in the unit will have any access to the Scout’s personal data; only the parents will be able to access it, should they want their kid to continue in Scouting at their next station.

The reason my.scouting.org restricts the number of positions for adults is to encourage Troop leaders to build out the adult support network for the Troop, and to avoid having two or three adults trying to handle everything. I understand your position is a little different than most units, since you’re in an overseas council, but the point is the same – many hands make light work.

You can still do that. We ensured that families who request to be removed from our unit can be.

I’m aware that’s still possible. I’m concerned by the argument that we should be converging on “one source of truth” regarding membership and involvement, when that source is not readily updated, and those who are maintaining it have conflicts of interest (e.g. paid membership = full year) with the users (family or leader requests separation).

1 Like

Ok, looking at the context of this discussion being Internet Advancement and logs, I see that point. I’ll admit that my unit hasn’t entered a single service hour since the new logs went live. The usability feedback on the logs does get reported to the developers.

1 Like

I don’t know that there’s really a conflict of interest there… On one hand, you have “update membership record at recharter/recharter is good for one year” and on the other you have “family moves and/or quits Scouting”.

The BSA keeps Scouts’ historical data after they end their active participation in the Scouts across the board. I don’t know (and would really doubt) that the BSA takes any action to delete a youth’s records when a family says “we’re moving, don’t contact us any more”.

So what you really have is a request from the family to modify what Scoutbook is doing (not what my.scouring.org is doing) which is sending out emails and calendar reminders. That’s pretty easy to deal with in Scoutbook…

Based on the current functionality, yes. However, I’m concerned that a move to use the my.scouting roster as a single-source would undermine that functionality, as a number of other functions have similarly been undermined by such moves (e.g. training reporting is now linked exclusively to registered positions as it is only reported through the my.scouting interface).

I feel like I’m wandering pretty far OT at this point, so if this is interesting enough as a side discussion, we should probably take it to its own channel.

1 Like

Sure, though I don’t know if there’s any plan to move the communication part of everything out of Scoutbook – if they do, it’ll probably be into IA2, not my.scouting.org

One way or another, we’ll always have to have a way to Mark scouts as inactive to prevent communications from going out to those who don’t want them. If nothing else, the BSA doesn’t want their emails to be treated as spam.

2 Likes

Charley, You nailed my point. I have full control in Scout Book as CC to edit. While I have virtually no control in IA2 or my scouting.

For example, our Pack had 60 scouts, and 20 leaders in Dec 2019. Today I have two leaders, and we have built up the Pack to 45 scouts that were below 30 Scouts this summer with changes happening daily and this is an annual cycle in FEC military units.

Scoutbook is hard to even manage and I log in several times a day and refresh, then a scout disappears and I have to figure out who it was.

I am now facing recharter and 90% of the pack will probably change in one year. The good news is we will probably recruit all-new scouts into the program from military families.

IA2 pulls all the information from my.scouting and we would be failing units if we took away their edit rights as we have already seen with IA logs.

1 Like