Position of Responsibilty Tracking

I know you are just a messenger but I feel like this is a very tired excuse. Of course as leaders we need to be checking to see that they actually “served actively in your troop”. Just like all items in Scoutbook a leader should be approving and ensuring they met their requirements. The other platforms would fill in the date for you for when the scout “technically” met that requirement but I could go in and change the date if I felt like that scout needed to put more time in. Most scouts do participate actively, at least I would hope the Troop SPL and other leaders are ensuring that this is happening and it is the exception when they are not! Like poster MatthewJohnson said, have it turn green with the date then have it need approval by a leader. I don’t have time to go in that deep into Scoutbook and look back and calculate each scouts time, and we probably have less scouts than others. There is no reason Scoutbook can’t make this easier. I have scouts coming to me all the time asking when they will have met their requirement. (No not all my parents are using Scoutbook yet, it is a work in progress). So it ends up falling on me to try to answer that question. Overall I really like Scoutbook but I feel like the excuses for not making it better are tiring. I get that it isn’t an instant fix, but I would like to know that it is something that will be considered/worked on instead of having ideas discounted with tired excuses.

I would throw the question back at the Scout. If the Scout came to me and said “When have I completed my 6 month POR requirement for life?” I would ask the Scout “When did you start the POR? Do YOU feel you have been active for the required 6 months?” If the Scout can’t answer the when question, there is a problem that Scoutbook can’t solve. The Scout is responsible for tracking tenure, not the leaders. Yes, the leader should be able to validate the dates, but the Scout should know when the tenure started.

If the Scout feels he/she has been active (and the time is correct) but you feel the Scout needed to do more, why was it allowed to get to the 4 or 6 months without a discussion? As leaders we should be helping the Scouts achieve their goals. If a Scout in a POR is not performing satisfactorily, the leaders should be having discussions with the Scout along the way to find out why. Just as you would not want to find out from your boss at your annual performance review that you were not doing the job expected, a Scout should not have to wait until the end of the tenure to find out performance was not acceptable.

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We have elections every six months. If a scout can’t remember in October that he was elected in April, he’s probably got bigger problems than positions of responsibility.

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You also have to take into consideration when they earned their last rank as well and sometimes that can be difficult to remember! Again simplifying the issue would not be out of line.

The Scout’s Leadership page already does this. Hover your cursor over the last rank earned and you can see the Scout’s date of rank. Hover over the individual position patches, and you can see how many days the Scout has held that position while at that rank.

I am not asking for no discussion nor that the scout not be a big part of tracking. I am saying it is not that much to ask to make it more user friendly and easier for the adults to do a quick check! I have scouts that are overzealous and want to rank up quickly. Those scouts shouldn’t be ranked up just because the “feel” they have met the criteria. So let’s say the scout says “yes I feel I have met the requirements”. However, once checked they still have at least 2 months left? Selfishly I would like to be able to check that quickly, not have to go into several different panels and then calculate it in my head when they got their rank/when they had a position of responsibility that qualified for that rank etc (those being in completely separate areas of scoutbook)! I also have to report to the committee to let them know how scouts are doing overall. Sometimes they may have questions pertaining to certain scouts based on issues of moving forward in scouts. Making it easier for me and/or the scout to look isn’t getting out of doing the work itself. In fact it may very well help that scout be more on top of what they need to be doing or any positions they may need to run for.

You don’t have to go to several different screens. Just go to the Scout’s Leadership screen and make sure that the Scout’s PORs qualify for the rank requirement (i.e. Assistant Patrol Leader, Patrol Scribe, Patrol Quartermaster, etc. do not qualify and Bugler only qualifies for Star and Life - not Eagle).

OK, how so? When I go into the leadership screen it just shows what positions he has served in that rank for how many days. But it makes it look like he still has a ways to go. Even if he has served over 183 days in a rank that only requires 6 months. So that doesn’t really tell me anything. This particular scout has a cognitive issue and math is hard for him. Not that I really want to sit there and calculate out how many days in 6 moths or 3months either. Is it just too complicated for scoutbook to put green box in the position of authority so I can just go the the rank section and see where they are at tentatively? If so just say so? I know Scoutbook officials have a bunch of items to fix and other ideas to look at I just don’t understand why this can’t be looked at as an option in the future to make things easier. That is all I ask!

Hi, @AlyssaSchaefbauer,

Navigate down to the scout’s leadership page. If all of the positions qualify, then then the number of days listed next to the rank is the number of days served. Done.

If not (e.g. the snapshot below where some leadership was as APL and some was as Instructor), hover over the position or positions listed next to the rank that do qualify. There is a pop-up that says (in this case) “While a First Class Scout, Scout’s name has served 57 days as a Instructor.”

Even though this particular scout has been an instructor since he was Tenderfoot (he’s really good at navigation), he is still quite a ways short of his leadership requirements for Star, and that’s clear from this interface.

Alyssa - I think you are after the auto complete mode that Troopmaster implements. The one variable that would come into play is that the scout can serve in one of more leadership positions and does not need to be continuous or contiguous. So the stop start dates would also need to be taken into the calculation.

But knowing the number of days a Scout served is part of the requirement. There is no way for a computer to know if during those 180 days (6 months) the Scout was “active”. Only a human can determine if the Scout completed the requirement as written since it is more than just time in position.

Yes I loved that feature in Troopmaster. It was such a quick way to see if the “dates” met. Of course the leaders always checked to see if the scout was active or participated regularly but it was so handy to have that date entered to be able to do a quick look. When you are the administrator of scoutbook and have boys, parents and leaders checking in with you it is nice to do a quick check! They would have to have a leader check off the part of being active but even troopmaster would tell me if a position qualified, and they would have a date quickly available. As far as the more than one leadership I wasn’t aware. I understand the continuous part but Troopmaster I believe would stop counting if they didn’t have a position of responsibility entered. But if a scout is two different positions what does that mean?

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I am not sure I am understanding. I have a boy who has served 299 days in three different positions. All of which are positions that qualify under Life. Which would meet the the needed 6 months. But on his screen it still appears that he need more time (still gray area on the screen). That is deceiving. Is there something I am missing?

Alyssa - your only concern would be the number of days and not the graph.

Hi, @AlyssaSchaefbauer,

Ah, I see. As far as I know, the gray area isn’t intended to be a visual representation of anything.

ETA: Corrected my previous statement about the green bar not matching to scale. It does. I’m just blind.

I think the bar may fill at 365 days… have not tested the theory.

OK, thank you. Can you see how that is confusing to the young scouts and parents? I have struggled with it! It isn’t a quick look thing, I have to figure out how many days in 3 or 6 months, then add or subtract whether or not that position qualifies. Troopmaster just made it so easy, yes I admit I am spoiled. But Troommaster didn’t deter from the leaders still having to decide if the boy was active or not. Just seems like something that could be addressed in the future. Even changing the color of the line so that you know they met the minimum qualifications and now are just doing leadership for the sake of being a leader. For example the green line turning yellow at the point of (according to what is entered) meeting the days, then that grayish color for whatever reason that is there. Then it is still up to scout/leaders to fill in dates. That could help make it easier to understand and could be the “quick look” myself and others are looking for.

Seems to me that 3 months is 90 days and 6 months is 180 and there are certainly a number of day/date calculators.

A post was split to a new topic: Getting Attendance Percentage from Scoutbook