[Timothy D. Ginn]

For those who aren't aware of a few of the technical specifications of the current FIRST system, here's what I've been able to gather (from various FIRST officials) about how it works.

At each individual regional, the data is live, only to them.
At the end of each day of the regional (or at intermissions throughout the day) the data from each regional is uploaded via some method to the main US FIRST server.
Throughout the day, staff from one regional are sometimes able to collaborate with staff from another simultaneous regional.
The US FIRST server then warehouses all of the data to be able to be provided to other people.
If (when) the database software is rewritten, it usually occurs over the summer months (since many of the volunteers are teachers).

Now, here's some speculation:

In the current system that the US FIRST site is running, they appear to have the ability to have multiple templates, currently the only one seemingly available is 'web', it may be possible to ask them to create, or offer to help them create, an XML template, which would then make parsing data from the US FIRST site itself easy.

This could potentially relieve some of the burden on whatever team is planning on running each regional server, if they happen to be out of town and unable to upload the data each night to the FSN central server.