[danshaffer]

We ran pretty intense scouting operations at both of our regionals this year. Thursday we took a more relaxed approach, sending one or two people around to fill out our pit scouting form. (We forgot the form in vegas, so we had to make up the questions. Luckily we had a notebook.) Thursday night we inputted the info in our database with pics. The database was a java app from team 768, modified by our programming team. We added some algorithms for offense and defense, as well as some averages.
Friday we had six people in the stands with clipboards and a sheet of paper for every robot in every match. Participants were forced to work this, with the understanding that they were missing school, so ought to be useful. We took relatively detailed notes on autonomous, focus, ringers on each level, ramps, spoilers, and then we asked for an A-F grade and general comments. Friday night we put all of this data into our modified java app, then sorted teams based on number of ringers per match and ramp deployment percentage. This gave us a list of the top scorers, including that we were #12 at LVR.
This info allowed us to generate a very nice scouting report after being selected. We called three of the four quarterfinals correctly, and said that the other (ours) was too close to call. Turns out we beat the #4 in two matches, and 8 managed to beat 1 in one match, while we called 1 over 8 by more than 100 points.
It was a pain to get, enter and analyze all of this data, but it gave us a much better look at the field than FIRST's rankings. Pity we didn't get to use it.