[Jon Stratis]

I can see some potential difficulties for a scouting award - chief among them the fact that the scouts are (for the most part) in the stands, not in the pits where the judges are!

But to be productive towards the concept of creating such an award, here are my thoughts:
- Recruit judges from local sport organizations. Those organizations, be it professional or college, have scouting programs of their own. They scout prospective recruits. They scout upcoming opponents. They collect and collate a wealth of information in order to make the decisions they need to make, and someone like that would be an ideal candidate for judging scouting in FRC. Further, it would help us, as a program, reach out into the existing sports world to become better known.
- Look for how a team uses its scouting data. Is it only for alliance selection? Is it used to determine strategy for elims? Is it used the entire competition to determine strategy for every match? Is it used to send students to learn more about efficient, excellent designs?
- Look for how a team uses their scouting data/system for outreach. Is information available to other teams? Do they participate in a multi-team scouting approach? Do they have information on their system (or even a blank copy of the system) available for other teams?
- Look for the quality of product produced. Are they setting a clear separation of qualitative versus quantitative data? What sort of data are they gathering, and how do they sum it up to create something usable?
- Look for efficiency in the scouting process. What has the team done over the past few years to make the process easier and more reliable? How many people does it take to scout a single match, and why does it take that many?

There are many approaches to scouting out there, and many different systems. There are strengths and weaknesses for all of them. Having an award that celebrates scouting could help increase awareness of the need for this data amongst younger teams, and provide an incentive for older teams with established scouting programs to reach out and bring everyone up to speed.