Well, you have a couple of different issues to consider… First, Scoutbook isn’t the only system that BSA IT has to support, so they have to consider the SB requests along with all their other systems that they maintain.
Second, none of us (even the SUAC members) have any visibility into the BSA IT roadmap or how the devs prioritize their work. The nice thing that Gary has as a volunteer is the freedom and flexibility to work on whatever he deems important.
Third, it’s bold to assume that the BSA is in a hiring mode, and that Gary is willing to leave his real, paying job to work for them.
Steve,
You obviously have a much better idea of the prioritization of resources than I do, being much closer to Scoutbook. I am just speaking as a volunteer in the field. To those of us on the front lines, it feels that BSA is ignoring us and simply not putting in the resources required to fix the tool that we are essentially required to use.
I realize that BSA IT has to support other systems. However, my understanding is the original intent was to purchase Scoutbook to roll everything into that system. That would mean supporting one modern system instead of a host of legacy systems, which become more expensive to support each year.
When they bought Scoutbook, there was a dedicated revenue stream of $1/user. I’d gladly pay $1/user to have a robust app that did what we need it to do! A large portion of the dues increase last year was supposedly to pay for an IT systems overhaul. That was millions of dollars that weren’t spent where they were supposed to have been.
It is crazy to me that the SUAC doesn’t have visibility into the BSA IT roadmap and is probably the biggest indicator that BSA doesn’t give a hoot about their actual users. If they did, they would loop in the moderators/SUAC to help them prioritize features and truly engage the users. As it is, BSA relies on the SUAC to protect them from users and their requests.
I get that Gary has freedom and flexibility to work on whatever he deems important. My point was that he is a VOLUNTEER who has done this ON HIS OWN TIME! I’m assuming he has a “real” job, which means he is putting part-time hours into it. If that is the case, he makes BSA IT look like chumps because they cannot do even a portion of what he has done with full-time help! He has literally run circles around them!
I’m sure/I hope that Gary is getting paid well for what he does at his “day” job! I’m not advocating that he leave that for less pay. However, Google, Netflix and others have proven that there are those certain programmers that are worth 10X the salary of normal programmers. Gary may be one of those individuals. Assuming he is, BSA should hire him on the spot and get Scoutbook fully operational within 12 months!
I so appreciate what Gary has done with the FAE. However, I wasn’t even aware of the tool or the functionality until I’d spent years as a Cubmaster. It would have saved me untold hours of manual entry over that time period. I just informed others in our Troop about it and it will allow us to pull YPT reports that are otherwise not available, as well as put in A/B form dates all at once instead of individually. People just don’t know about the tool and what it could do. It would be so nice to have all these features integrated into the application itself and all it would take is BSA stepping up to the plate and committing to get it done. I know that having one system running everything would be a vast improvement over the various systems that Councils have to deal with now.
