Would you share Scouting Data?

[diswed0226]

Hey all! I wanted to see what the community opinion on sharing scouting data was. Personally, I think it would be incredibly awesome if you could go onto the blue alliance or some other website and see exactly how many goals a team made. That said, I can also understand not wanting to share the data your scouts worked so hard to gather. Share your thoughts!

[scaryone]

We always can and do

[ngreen]

There are a few levels to consider:

1) After-season archived scouting data. I encourage teams to put their code and data after events onto a public repository, like GitHub. Many already do this, but the more the merrier.

2) Analysis tools based on public data. Sharing tools for in-season scouting by writing about them and sharing scouting techniques.

3) Informal scouting partnerships. These can be useful, especially between teams that already have connections. With more specific data, there are more challenges to analyze the scouting data before it is needed. Either the form of the data should be shared in advance, so partners can develop their own schema or both the data and schema should be shared.

4) Crowd-sourced data. Like if TBA had a place where the community could add additional match data (the form decided in advance). Then anyone could build tools to analyze this, but it would rely on participants at each event to collect/add the data. It also to some degree takes some standardization to be most useful. For example, for teams that track scoring areas would you use 6 or 9.

Either way, I will say last year everyone was gracious sharing their scouting with us. We were given a nice macro-enabled spreadsheet by 4522 (i think). And I've seen many examples of open scouting here. Maybe we can form a partnership with several teams for GKC this year.