This is a great thread... it captures the potential and the problems that those of us who are interested in scouting must deal with. Even though we all agree that collaborating will make things better for everyone, we all want to use our own set of fields in the database. I know that has been our biggest problem in collaborating in the past with the great efforts of the Motorola people (the ones who WASH with SOAP
). Last year I swore to myself that we would for sure work harder to collaborate... but here we go again with our own set of attributes that we care about. Mike Soukup's comments were right on imho.
So we too (team 65, or GMCIA if you want to get brand-specific) will be building a scouting database (in fact it already started when we brought a crew to Cleveland to learn our new Palm templates using ThinkDB). It probably wont be on the web in any flashy form, but we will use it extensively for our alliances.
I'm looking forward to the day where great scouting collaboration at nationals makes divisions unnecessary - so the best qualifiers can pick anyone.
Maybe next year...
Ken