Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info â 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.
This is a good point. At the same time, I tend to think that minimizing the number of locations for data is always a good thing. At some point, the scoutmaster does have to enter information for advancement, unless s/he wants to go totally paper. And, if they were to go totally paper, they ultimately will have to enter information into some website/database somewhere.
If national-council got on the same page and built a model where there is one database for everything that is functional and expansive enough to include whatever benchmarks national and council require, while at the same time creating data entry interfaces through Scoutbook or whatever for Troops and districts, we would have a winner.
Data is data. The computers dont care about the data we enter. Humans have to enter and use the data. If we cant get information in and out easily, it is pointless. Again, its 2020 folks. This is not a huge ask, nor is it crazy. It does require that someone at a higher level make a decision that they are going to ask the right people to put this all together.
That is actually what is happening with scoutbook.com and scoutbook.scouting.org as they are the same database. The main goal is to decomm all that is scoutnet as it has long passed its support window. The interface is all we are looking at when we are in scoutbook.com or scoutbook.scouting.org
Stephen, thats what i thought was happening. If thats the case, then why the change in the Scoutbook interface so that it jumps to my.scouting thing?
Granted, it is partially past historical experience, but my.scouting has never been very functional in my mind, while from day one Scoutbook was optimal. DONT FIX WHAT IS NOT BROKEN!
@ThomasFinan - I do not think it actually rolls into my.scouting, but rather the upper level domain of scouting.org. The primary issue that is happening with scoutbook.com is the base code is not lending itself well to the enhancements that users have asked for nor is it proving to be one where developers are actually working in. It a nutshell it is also nearing its sunset.
Well, i for one would gladly pay a surcharge for them to continue to develop Scoutbook. If they made that the standard, and then said that units who would need some financial support could apply for it, you would generate some decent revenue to support it.
They do care about service hours. This entry will count directly toward council JTE. It also is the basis for the total number of hours that national quotes in media and possibly in applying for grants.
Legacy Scoutbook is written in classic asp. Finding classic asp programmers is becoming very difficult. The decision has been made to move Scoutbook to a more modern programming stack. This stack is hosted at scoutbook.scouting.org (Internet Advancement). The issue isnât so much what domain is being used as it is what the interface looks like. The SUAC is advocating for users to the BSA to improve the Internet Advancement interface to make it more user friendly.
Thatâs not really the point, though. The underpinnings for Scoutbook are outdated, and adding many of the improvements that users here are clamoring for isnât possible on the current architecture. Hereâs a comment from @edavignon from a few months ago that really summarizes the issue well:
This! A thousand times this. I appreciate that yâall suffer the scut work of carrying water between the user base who (I among them) want everything âfixedâ now and the developers/BSA IT who (based on some interface design choices) I suspect are not as a group boots-on-the-ground scouters/scouts trying to use the system theyâre developing. Iâve said it before but Iâll say it again here: next to nobody cares what the back-end looks like as long as the front end is both functional for the users and doesnât keep changing too frequently.
One huge ask is for the developers/BSA IT to consider a process-oriented approach to the UI/UX, rather than the object-oriented one currently promulgated in IA2.
Leader-type users should be able to go in with the mindset that âI need to add merit badges to scoutsâ and get into that process path without having to select scouts first.
Also, a lot of the users like the web-based âdashboardâ interface for the scouts and parents, rather than just the smartphone app. There are many scouts/parents who donât have smartphones or large data plans that do have computer access. Losing the friendly web interface would be a disaster for those folks. I donât know that eliminating the Scoutbook dashboard interface is in the offing, but I felt like it was better to get the user concern out there early than have to complain to get it back later when the coding is already finished.
Itâs like when you buy anything: many issues arenât visible until after you have it. I suspect the intent was to update Scoutbook, but they later discovered that the stack wasnât able to do what they/the users wanted it to do (or that they couldnât get programmers/architects with the right skill sets) and elected to move forward down a different path. The BSA has owned Scoutbook for some time now, and have continued to make updates where feasible. Itâs just that the bulk of the development effort appears to have moved to its replacement, IA2.
