[jvriezen]

Answers to some questions and challenges to my proposal:

Are teams required to contribute crowd-scouts?

No. Teams would check a box at registration time to join crowd scouting and all teams would know who is crowd-scouting before the event. They can collaborate on logistics/technology prior to the event.

Do you share data with teams that are unable to contribute?

They can optionally share data with non-participating teams-- It would gracious to share with a small team that has barely members enough to drive and staff the pit, but reasonable not to share with a large team that should have scouting eyes to share but chooses not to help the crowd.

If yes, will teams abuse this? If no, who makes that judgement call?

Again, its up to those participating in crowd scouting to determine if/how to share as a group decision.


How is the data managed, averaged, and shared?

The crowd scouting teams collaborate before (or even during) the event and teams that care enough will provide/promote a system that serves their wants. Note that crowd-scouting need only gather and share the raw data. Each team participating can take the raw data and have private data crunching that they do not share. Or the crowd teams may decide to have crowd-crunch and share. This would be a major 'coopertition' opportunity! (or would you rather have coopertition game elements in the game rules? )



Do I get to take the data home Friday night?

I see no reason why not.


Could the data be poisoned before and/or after averaging? Will it be?

I'm going to assume this will be an extremely isolated case and not that difficult to detect, as most scouts should have very close counts of the raw data.

How do you keep scouting sheets circulating between 36 people? (already difficult to do with 6)

This is an engineering problem that an enterprising team will need to solve. There is no requirement that you have six sets of eyes on each bot. Your crowd scouting strategy may be two or three sets of eyes on each bot, others doing some data aggregation from the prior match-- again, this is invention that is not dictated in any way. FIRST says if you agree to crowd scout, you work with other teams to decide who occupies seats (probably a rotating schedule) and you share at least raw data gather by scouting observers-- that's it.

As to the complaint that teams won't be able to 'scout' the way they want (i.e. 18 scouts in 2009 to watch bots, trailers, humans)... Consider this:

The ideal scouting setup for your team is to have as many scouts as you care to, and have them all stationed right beside the field with Wi-Fi connected handheld cameras and input devices, and also able to record the conversations behind the alliance wall. Obviously the extreme ideal is logistically impossible to provide for every team. Well, the current model of each team having its own full scouting team with decent near-field seating is also logistically not feasible, even if you want it to be. That's why we have this thread.

We cooperate in the pits and share tools/parts/skills, why can't we cooperate with collecting raw scouting data?