What is the Technology Advisory Committee (TAC)?

Technology Strategy and Plans
21

Lots to digest in the new Tech Hub… and I know it’s going to inspire a lot of questions!

(For instance: Will the new calendar functionality include the ability for a council to publish its calendar, allowing units to easily include individual council and district events on unit and sub-unit calendars?)

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22

just read through the site, reads like an 80’s tech company sells pitch.

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23

And thus how would you prevent councils and districts from having to enter this info twice since many are already doing this in a third party system that manages registration?

24

They wouldn’t HAVE to enter it twice… they might CHOOSE to simply keep their council calendar in this system, if there was enough of a benefit from doing so. Additionally, the technology road map shows at least the potential for integration with various external systems such as BlackPug, Councilware and Doubleknot.

25

I’d like to volunteer. I have significant devops and platform experience at web-scale in highly regulated environments, so I think my knowledge base could be of help. I’ve built teams that do this at several companies, but I also get in the weeds and would be willing to contribute time and code.

I’m also working on an open source scouting project to make it easier for troops/packs to create brand-appropriate websites, handouts, etc. I think there’s a huge collaboration opportunity for Scouting America and the open source community and I’d love to assist in any way I can.

26

Enable calendar feeds in a standardized way so that packs can easily ingest and merge them with their own events. Thinking from a hierarchy perspective, each unit belongs to a council and district, it’s council events can appear as a feed that the unit could enable or disable as desired. As long as we keep some sane categories, the unit could even enable/disable appropriate categories. For example, a cub scout pack could re-publish (enable) the council’s “cub scout” category as well as “adult training opportunities” and any other relevant categories.

I don’t think this is a difficult problem to solve, just detailed. We’d need to think through the specific implementation details and figure out the categorization and taxonomies and then iterate on it a few times.

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