well, somebody had to be first

[Ken Patton]

On behalf of GMCIA, we are interested in working together on this. I think both of you touched on key points for scouting success:

1. Need for an accepted (and most important, COMMON) scouting template. This will enable many teams to scout using their own methods and tools but still share data. We need to publish the fields in the database earlier this year. This is hard to do, and is dependent on good definitions of all the data fields.

2. Need for actual data from matches. I call this "results-based" as opposed to "what the machine is supposed to do." If the data is from actual matches, and enough matches are recorded, the true performance of a team can be understood.

We are intent on again using Visors or Palms for at-the-field data entry. It has proven to be the good solution for high volume scouting by multiple people. We will share our scouting template too, so anyone who wants can start taking data at competitions.

Ken