Introducing Lookout for FRC: Your Comprehensive Team Management Solution

[aliddy23]

Open Lookout

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After years of development and testing, I’m excited to unveil Lookout, an all-encompassing, fully web-based application created by a FIRST team for FIRST teams. Lookout goes beyond just scouting functionality to offer a unified platform catering to every aspect of your team’s needs. From detailed match and pit scouting to streamlined task management and beyond, Lookout delivers a comprehensive suite of features designed to elevate your team’s performance.

Powerful Scouting

At the core of Lookout lies its powerful scouting capabilities. Drawing from our firsthand experience with various scouting systems, we’ve engineered Lookout to strike the perfect balance between simplicity and robust functionality. Say goodbye to clunky interfaces and limited features – Lookout redefines scouting with its intuitive design and advanced capabilities.

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Effortless Attendance Tracking

Keep tabs on member attendance effortlessly with Lookout’s user-friendly interface. Our intuitive controls empower you to customize attendance ranking calculations with ease, ensuring accurate and insightful attendance management.

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Seamless Task Management

Experience seamless collaboration and enhanced communication within your team through Lookout’s integrated task management system. Facilitating transparent interaction between subteams and mentors, Lookout streamlines the design-to-implementation process, fostering cohesion across the entire team.

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More Features

• Track transactions, payments, and sponsors
• Upload and share your teams’ files
• Slack integration (coming soon)
• Expanded task management (coming soon)
• Inventory management (coming soon)
• CAD and design workflows (coming soon)
• Budgeting (coming soon)

Lookout is more than just a scouting tool – it’s a comprehensive solution designed to optimize every part of your team’s operations.

This app is in closed beta, so teams that register must remember that bugs may lead to loss of data. Learn more and request access now!

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please DM me or reply to this thread.

Thank you, Aidan from FRC Team 2641

[PatMcN]

Is your team using this software right now for this season? How is it going? Seems super cool.

[Kevin_Leonard]

@aliddy23

Powerful Scouting

At the core of Lookout lies its powerful scouting capabilities. Drawing from our firsthand experience with various scouting systems, we’ve engineered Lookout to strike the perfect balance between simplicity and robust functionality. Say goodbye to clunky interfaces and limited features – Lookout redefines scouting with its intuitive design and advanced capabilities.

Can you describe more what makes Lookout different than other scouting apps people have made? How does it take data? How does it export data to a database? Details would help the community understand what we’re looking at here

[Chris_Elston]

I wished someone would develop an app for your phone for FRC teams that is like Stack Team App, or Team Snap etc…but for FRC…This looks like it’s going that direction?

[aliddy23]

Yes, we’re using it for this season. We have seen a pretty solid increase in productivity. Everybody seems to be on the same page without much effort. Historically, we’ve always had issues with staying organized and on track. So far, that has been much less of an issue.

[aliddy23]

The main difference is that it goes beyond just scouting, it’s team management, from meeting attendance to team finances. Data is entered through the app’s forms. Data is stored in our Mongo database. We are working on a whitepaper with more detailed technical information as well as a demo.

[aliddy23]

Yeah, apps like those were the inspiration for this. Originally, this was devised as just that, but we decided integrating scouting directly into it would be beneficial.

[philso]

This looks great. What kinds of data access is used to transfer and synchronize data, WiFi, cell, Bluetooth, other? What operating systems does this work on? Is there a Gantt chart view for the Task Management function? Does the Task Management function alert the people that tasks are assigned to?

[aliddy23]

At the moment, internet connection is required, however we have plans to implement some sort of offline support in the future. This app is web-based, so it runs on anything. A Gantt chart view, along with an overall expansion to project management, is the next major update, but at the moment tasks are shown in a kanban view:

Also, a Slack integration will be made available within two weeks, which will notify members of their task assignments.

[techplex]

Looks awesome, the request access seems to be giving 500 errors:

Lookout

[aliddy23]

Sorry, I was literally just pushing an update, try now.

[kabir]

Hey Lookout team! In an effort to increase interoperability between scouting apps, we recently announced The Purple Standard (TPS), a unified, community-driven standard for FRC scouting data (see https://chiefdelphi.com/t/the-purple-standard-a-unified-and-community-driven-standard-for-frc-scouting-data/449394 and https://thepurplestandard.com), paving the way for collaborative scouting across apps (which benefits smaller teams and rookies). TPS is modular and completely customizable based on the data you want to collect in your scouting app. Would you be interested in integrating TPS into your app to benefit teams using Lookout and join the wider network of collaborative scouting data?

[AdamF]

How is the user data stored? Being a whole team management app it would be storing a lot of student personal data, just want to make sure user data is safe.

Do you expect this to stay free into the future? It looks like we will need to find an alternative to Trello after the season ends as they are limiting their free workspaces to 10 users.

[aliddy23]

I am working on more detailed technical documentation, but here’s a quick rundown of our data security practices:

1. Data sanitization
   All data inserted into the database is sanitized before insertion, prevent injection attacks.

2. Hashed and salted passwords
   Passwords are hashed and salted using bcrypt before being stored in the database.

3. Token-based authentication
   We use JWTs (JSON Web Tokens) for token-based authentication. These sessions are reverified with each request.

4. Role-based access control
   User roles and permission levels are checked before performing sensitive operations, ensuring that only those who are authorized can access or modify certain data. Teams cannot access another team’s data.

5. Encrypted database backups
   Since Lookout is still very new, there may be some bugs. Because of this, the entire database is dumped, encrypted, and backed-up off-site.

6. Enterprise-grade firewall
   We host Lookout in our school’s on-site data center, which is protected by our state-of-the-art, enterprise-grade firewall.

7. Isolated database
   Lookout and its database run in a virtual machine. That database is isolated from external network connections and is configured to only support one connection at a time, meaning it can only be accessed by one process running on that VM.

8. DDOS and other HTTP-based attack protection
   Lookout declines requests from and blocks IP addresses with suspicious activity in an attempt to prevent denial of service and other similar attacks.

Hopefully this clarifies your questions about data security, if you have any more, please ask.

We have not made any decisions related to monetization at this point. I can say with certainty, however, that there will always be an free version available for all teams.

Because of Trello’s move, I have significant updates planned for this off-season related to project management, such as inventory tracking, purchase requests, shipment tracking, CAD and design management, Slack integration, and many more. We (Team 2641) already use Lookout extensively for everything we do and it has significantly improved our productivity and workflow, hopefully it does the same for your team!

[Fletch1373]

Is this a hosted/SaaS(software-as-a-service) platform, or something we would install and run ourselves? Based on your mention of VMs, I’m assuming the former.

If so, I believe @AdamF’s question was more about how/where the data is stored. If you’re collecting personal information (especially of minors) in a SaaS platform, you’re asking for trouble unless you’ve sought legal advice on what you can/can’t do with that data and what precautions you should be taking.

[AdamF]

Looks like he said they are hosting it on their schools servers, so it’s probably safe to assume it’s as okay as Trello

[aliddy23]

This platform is indeed hosted. We are in the process of seeking legal advice to create a privacy policy and ensure regulatory compliance.

Currently, as part of our provisional measures, when a student initiates the registration process with a team, they are prompted to provide the name and email address of a parent or guardian. Subsequently, a 6-digit verification code is sent to that email. Should the parent or guardian agree, they can share this code with the student, who will then use it to continue with the registration process. This step is essential and precedes the submission of any personal details.

It’s important to note that the scope of data collected during registration is determined by individual teams. Although the platform allows customization of registration fields to be required, optional, or hidden, certain fields—specifically username, password, and first and last name—are mandatory for account creation. However, from a technical perspective, all other information is optional, and there are no requirements for the authenticity of the name provided.

Here are the fields and their default values:

“Parent Information” is their name, phone number, email address, physical address, and relationship. Students can add multiple parents/guardians.

Should a student encounter difficulties with registration or obtaining a consent code, a mentor has the capability to manually set up an account for them. This approach necessitates that the mentor obtains parental or guardian consent through offline means.

We prioritize data privacy highly and do not engage in tracking or selling user information. The data we store is limited to what is voluntarily provided to us. Recognizing the potential concerns surrounding online data submission, we’ve designed most data fields to be optional, though individual teams may impose their own requirements for registration.

Please be aware that our security measures and policies are subject to refinement, and we are committed to enhancing transparency about our security protocols.

Hopefully this further clarifies anything! If you have more questions regarding data security, please DM me and I would be happy to give an even more detailed response.

[rsegrest]

Glad to see you are addressing regulatory compliance with legal advice. Working with students under the age of 18 can be tricky in this area. Have you considered the implications of monetization and COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act)? I know the majority of our FRC students are 14 or older but we do get the occasional kid who is 13.

[AdamF]

@rsegrest

Have you considered the implications of monetization and COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act)? I know the majority of our FRC students are 14 or older but we do get the occasional kid who is 13.

FYI COPPA is for under 13, so 13 year olds don’t fall under this law.

[rsegrest]

You are correct, thank you for pointing out the error regarding COPPA. In my state, similar laws apply to any individual under the age of 18 not just under 13.