Hi everybody! First off, congrats to everybody on a great season. I’m sure you guys all worked hard and made your coaches, sponsors, and most importantly, yourselves, proud.
During champs, one of my major takeaways came during alliance selection - teams would generally take a really long time, and felt pretty unsure, at least in my stupid opinion, when it came to making their final choice (this is also my first champs, so I don’t know if this is normal).
However, in my eyes, proper access to solid scouting data to make strong decisions on who to pick should not be limited to large teams able to scout a wide variety of teams, or teams with enough programmers to in-house a scouting app. I want to amend this by creating a “communal” (in a sense) scouting app. I want it to be able to gather quantitative data on a specific team through their matches, much as any other scouting app would work. However, the difference in this system will lie on who collects the data - anybody on (as a member, mentor, coach, etc.) a team that registers with the app. This should not only allow teams access to data, it increases the accuracy of the tabulated results as well by bogging down the bad data. Every team on the app will still get their own private area to do qualitative scouting and take general observations, so that aspect is still preserved. If anyone else shares my vision or wants to help out with this project, please join this discord: https://discord.gg/AB4xjca4pH . Thank you all so much!
Having a shared FRC resource of scouting data and the ability to average out “whoops I missed a widget” would be awesome!
And, it opens up the possibility of gamification between scouting teams to help with motivation!
I would like for something like this to catch on. It occurred to me at championships how odd it was that there were ~50 individuals in the stands counting the number of balls that one team scored in every match. With six teams on the field, that needs the focus of 300 people. To count balls. That’s a lot of redundant effort!
I think the only hesitation of a communal scouting app is that some teams may want to collect different metrics. For example we really wanted starting location (and shot heat maps but didn’t get there) https://bionic-qr.netlify.app/
The other hesitation is the notes our scouts take we would prefer not to share. This seems like fairly common among published scouting data, notes are removed.
I think a communal app could be super valuable, but would need to be flexible enough to allow teams to specify additional metrics/fields to collect.
As soon as the flexibility is added for additional metrics, then the analysis system needs to be flexible enough to get the desired answers.
The Green Alliance team @alexiagilardi and @roshanravi may be able to speak more about their experiences.