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(Damp Robot): I don't know if I would trust data that's gathered by "the community" for more than cursory overviews of robots. Our scouters all know the value of the data they collect, and see that it's of a real benefit to our team in qual matches and in alliance selection. That means that if they collect the data, it's good data. If an amorphous group of kids from different teams was working on the same data, they likely wouldn't have the same motivation to "get it right." You might end up with missing matches, people over counting their own teams, or just general slacking off. Of course, I agree having only one group of 7 per regional scout would be a ton less work, but potentially at the cost of data quality.
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Originally Posted by Qbot2640
And to the "data-sharing" issue...I definitely believe you should have to contribute to benefit. From my perspective, this benefits the rookie teams or smaller teams much more. Consider, if there was no investment required to obtain this data, the teams with the best scouting programs could hold all their own scouters for their own data, yet still get the larger group data. A smaller or less experienced team might not be able to generate good data themselves. On the other hand, if you need to contribute to the effort to gain access to the data the former team WILL participate because they won't want to risk missing something that everyone else will have access to. Their benefit will still be considerably less than the latter team, since the data they would have without cooperation would already be pretty good.
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If you want good data, you can't force people to scout. I think we all agree on this point. Where this discussion leads from here depends on the goals of a collaborative scouting project. If the goal is for a few teams to work together to build some connections and gain a collective competitive advantage over the rest of the teams, then it might make sense to only allow access to the data to teams who contributed. That's not really the way I think of this. I think everyone would be better off if the data was freely available to anyone who wants it.
The way to do this would be to incorporate the data collecting into the event volunteer staff. Teams provide the volunteers, and those people take the requisite training just like they would if they want to become inspectors / referees / etc. Then they collect quality data in their roles as the official scorekeepers, and stats get released for public consumption. Just like they do in athletics.
The lack of this type of official scoring data is a deficiency in the FRC program. It's not like FRC doesn't have enough on its plate for the few people who actually get paid to run the operation, so that's not a criticism of them. I just think this is something that the community and FRC should address in the long term.
If we want FIRST to be loud, having scoring statistics readily available would help a bit. It gives people something to look at online to learn who's who, and that draws certain types of people in. It would make it possible to produce events with commentary and some statistics incorporated into the broadcast to add context and history to the matches to make them more interesting to casual observers and newbies. Without that stuff, it's harder for an observer to know or care about the difference between teams 6875 and 6587 and 6758.