Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
I am a technology professional. I am also a Cubmaster. I would like to be able to access Scouting rank advancement information (in particular, Cub Scout adventures information including requirements and suggested activities) in such a way that it is consumable by a machine (an AI agent in my case). Options here include MCP, REST APIs or even just well-structured json or html pages that do not sit behind Cloudflare. This information must be machine readable.
I’m not asking for access to individual advancement records of scouts in this fashion (though that would be great). I just want to be able to easily access already-public advancement requirements and suggested activities. This information is not currently readable by a machine (it’s blocked by a captcha and Cloudflare).
What do I want to do with it? Examples that I might type into my AI chat:
“Help me and my Assistant Cubmasters come up with a synchronized meeting plan for this week’s den meetings. We have a campout planned for this coming weekend. Please identify adventures at each grade level that we could start at the den meetings and then complete together at the campout.”
“Help me come up with a meeting plan for my Webelos den. I have three scouts who have been here for the whole year, and three others who joined last month. I want to help these new scouts get caught up on the required adventures while having something new for the other scouts to do”
“My Lion Den Leader will be out this week and we don’t have a backup. Help my Tiger Den Leader plan a meeting on the topic of personal safety that addresses the requirements for both Lion and Tiger grade levels.”
I recognize that the answer to this ask is going to be “no”, or some other nonresponse such as “wrong forum”, or “we don’t handle that”, or whatever. But it’s worth an ask! If enough people start asking for stuff like this, maybe we’ll start getting what we need to better serve our units.
Thanks for the response that I predicted. I’m not asking for personal data; I’m asking for public information that’s already out there, only with less access restrictions.
More volunteers need to speak up about this and other technology improvements that would make the job of a volunteer easier. Each week, I have to manually crawl through the Cub Scout adventures pages to plan my meetings. It takes me about an hour each time. I have to cross-reference between each grade level to determine which requirements are common or similar, and which are for only a single den. Then I estimate how much time we commit to each activity, how they overlap, and then I identify leaders for each and distribute the meeting plan. We do not have enough den leaders to hold separate den meetings, so we combine where we can. This process is not a big deal for me, but I can see how it would be a deterrent for others.
Meanwhile, other youth organizations - who compete with Scouting America for members - are tinkering, experimenting and trying to figure out how to leverage new technologies. I use AI to plan practices for my AYSO soccer team. AI takes the stats from my Little League baseball games and generates a professional-looking sports report that our parents and kids love.
This organization needs to shift its thinking on how we support volunteers in the AI age. I would be happy to volunteer to help guide this transformation if there is a committee somewhere that’s looking at this.
We are just volunteers like you. All we can say is what we have been told in the past. If this is something you want to pursue you will have to work through your Council professional staff.
