I'm glad to see this forum is alive, hopefully we'll put it to good use this year.
I obviously agree with Wayne & Ken that scouting
must be done during actual matches and not by interviewing teams in the pits. The major drawback of interviewing teams has nothing to do with honesty; even honest teams don't know how to properly rate their robot. Before teams saw other teams in action I'm sure they thought they were potentially the top balancers last year, but when compared to the true standouts they were second tier. Teams have a tendency to over-state their abilities. What qualifies as good for an average team may not be good when compared to a national champion caliber team like Beatty. I'm pretty sure I posted a long message about this last year, so I'll spare everyone
We should all agree on a format / template / standard for scouting data this year. That way, any team can create a program to gather or dispense data and have it be compatable with everyone else. WASH & SOAP did this last year, but we didn't talk to GMCIA early enough to work with you guys. Hopefully these three scouting entities will have a truly unified scouting system this year.
I'm starting to sound like a broken record (or is it CD), but I agree that PalmOS handhelds are the best solution for high volume distributed scouting. That's why WASH is using PalmOS handhelds again this year.
Ken & others, we'll have to set up a conference call some time in the next couple of weeks to talk about plans for the upcoming season.
Mike