[archiver]

Posted by Trevor McCulloch at 1/29/2001 4:39 PM EST


Student on team #349, The Robahamas, from International Academy and Ford Motor Co and Bosch.



The problem with scouting this year is that now people are using
technology more and more as a tool to solve the problem of trying to scout
all the teams they *need* to know for the competition. Unfortunately, the
methods used are leading us back to the way we used to do things earlier.
In the past, each team would do it's own scouting of each and every other
team. In the end, this led to a lot of unnecessary work. But if we
coordinated scouting between teams, we could reduce the work load for
everyone by centralizing and sharing data. And thus was born the scouting
system.

Now we have a different problem: everyone wants to have their own
scouting system. If everyone creates their own system, then we create the
same problem we were trying to solve by creating these systems in the
first place: to centralize and share data. What really needs to happen is that
we all need to decide on *one* solution, and use that. Right now, we have
a myriad of diverging formats: some use MS Access, some use MySQL,
some use dead-tree format. One system collects one set of data, another
collects a different set. We need to settle on one set of data and one
format to put the data in and a method to transmit this data between
different teams at different events. Without addressing these inherent
problems, any sort of scouting database system isn't really a step forward.

Trevor
Team 349