ham_solo

1) It sounds like a good idea probably in the boardroom, but frankly I just don't see there being enough volunteers to staff totally duplicate programs.   

Maybe I am wrong, but based on what I know from my own troop, and what I know of our sister cub scout pack, there just aren't enough people willing to help out to make this happen.

2) How long until certain merit badges are dropped now because they have "sexist" content, or are labeled as "not fair" for the female scouts...

I am not trying to be a chauvinist here or anything, but come on, we all know how this works these days and how parents are.

A good question I always had was when is it appropriate to wear these hats?   

Weekly Troop meetings?  COH? Only when hiking and carrying your hiking stick?  Sitting around at camp?  To the grocery?

More and more evidence points to the massive benefits making the scouts outdoor experience be a formal "electronics free" zone and makes more sense to have a formal 'leave the phones at home' troop policy. 

I believe the more we give the youth time in the outdoors away from being 'connected' the more the benefits of the program.  

It is disappointing to see some camps and troops, etc so quickly try to 'embrace cell phones because they are so popular'.   I feel it is a disservice to boys to allow them to not be enjoying the outdoors, but to instead all be huddled around a picnic-table or even worse in a tent, staring at a phone screen watching some nonsense cat video on youtube.  Too many adults just want to not face the issue, are unwilling to take a stance, and are allowing this sort of thing to be more common.

It is not being a Luddite, or extremist to have part of the program be to experience that unplugging as part of the outdoor experience.

I am personally worried that parents have without a single thought, just because everyone else is doing it... stuck into the hands of their children and their developing minds, what is essentially totally experimental, untested, unproved, unknown instruments for affecting the mind and the development of their brains is a massive unguided, social experiment that could have horrible consequences for the next generation.

The BSA is just plain ignorant here.  They are letting themselves be dragged into constant LBGT discussions and arguments, and having to  come up with all these stupid rules of this person can be a member, that person can't be etc.. that just makes them look bad.

The real solution that the BSA seems determined to ignore at ALL costs of course, even though it is screaming in their face, is to just change to "US Scouts", and allow ALL young people to join, just like every single other scout organization around the world including Robert Baden Powell's original scouts in the UK. 
 
The only scouting organizations left in the world that are boys-only are the BSA, and Saudi Arabia where girls can't even drive or leave the house without a man. 
 
That is what really should change. All these additional rules and arguments are wasting time and focus on silly fringe issues that really only involve 1% or .01% of the population at large, let along the scout population, when a single rule change to allow all young people to join, and be just like every other scouting organization around the world, would end any and all future arguments.

Any opinions on how the G2SS would apply if we took some boys "jeepin"?   A bunch of us in the troop have jeeps and I have been asked if we could consider taking some of the older boys "jeeping" offroad, but I am not sure how the guide 2 safe scouting might apply.  I don't think these would count as the same rules as the little ATV type vehicles that some council camps let the scouts drive themselves, and that people are always flipping over etc..  yet, I don't know if this would count as normal vehicle driving.

We are talking about some pretty mild off-road trails in a park, not extreme rock crawling or anything like that.  Just gravel, mud, and maybe some stream crossing etc.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Just the other I was thinking to myself.... if BSA is so worried about membership declines, then WHY not have a national TV commercial campaign?!

I want to move my troop records online and I recently over the last few months, did an evaluation of all the options out there, signed up for trials, imported troop data into them, played with them and here is my results.  (as if anyone really cares, haha).

1) Scoutbook - totally not ready for prime time.  Its hardly even ready for any use.  Personally as an IT guy myself, I would not have considered it ready to show to anyone yet.  It's "pretty", but the fact you can't even do basic features such as repeating calendar entries is just a good indication of how much work it has to go to be really useful.  And the fact that BSA has purchased it probably is a net negative.  It will not be done by 'committee' and anyone with any IT experience usually means this slows software development down and often is of less quality than what a small dedicated team can produce.

2) TroopMaster/SOAR - yeah these were great 10 years ago, but the web has passed them by, and the fact you have to spend nearly $250-300/year between them to have a decent tracking system + shared user website is kinda out there for anything but maybe a mega-troop.  There are a bunch of other troops at my roundtable that uses is, and I could get help from them which would be nice, but frankly their old-school design (from the DOS days)  also does not lend to being shared/web based at all.  Sorry, but 1999 called and want's their troop software back.

3) Scouttrack.com - Looks "ok' but it did not really impress.  Honestly, it kinda felt like someone who is just a software developers decided to write some software for scouts, but is not actually a scouter or actually had experience running at troop.  I think the best way to put it is that it felt more like a $1.99 app on the iPhone app store.

4) TroopTrack http://www.trooptrack.com  - This is what I settled on.  It impressed with with the fact it has nearly every feature that I wanted to look for, is pretty easy to use(easier than scoutbook), is a modern multi-user web based system, it connects directly to and works with BSA ScoutNet, includes the best mailing lists I have seen, and provides a free website with management of the website integrated into it.   The support has been excellent for every question I have asked so far, and it is developed by a dedicated group of scouters for scouters.   I would say that for $99/year you get everything that SOAR + TroopMaster + Troopmaster Web + Troopmaster.Net provides and then some.

My recommendation is to look at TroopTrack.com if you are starting out today new and moving from paper like my troop is.  It is possible that everyone might move to scoutbook.com eventually if the BSA pumps enough effort and money into it, but I can guarantee you it will be at least 5+ years or so before that will be ready to compete with these others, and that is like 50 years in technology.

That is my unsolicited $.02 anyway.

OK, a side question

 

How would the organization's name be handled?

 

BOY Scouts of America

 

just doesn't work for this......

That is an easy one.   You follow what they did in the original boy scout group.

Lord BP's scout organization was called "The Boy Scout Association", they just changed their name to "The Scout Association". 

So I would suggest the BSA, change to something similar like "US Scout Association".

People get all uptight about these sort of issues, but in reality they are not a big deal.  BSA, just needs to go live with UK Scouts for awhile and learn what they do, they have decades of experience at running a very successful co-ed scout program that is growing better than ever since they did go co-ed.   ALL of these questions and problems people bring up, I guarantee you that the UK Scouts have probably already dealt with them by now.

If it works fine for just about every other scout organization in the world, including the one founded by Robert Baden Powell himself, and our closest neighbors in Canada, it pretty much makes any arguments that it would not work in the USA kinda silly to me.  

Most of the questions I see people put up have already be answered or figured out by other scout organizations.  BSA could learn from UK Scouts and Canada Scouts, as well as almost all other scout organizations in the worldwide scouting movement how to make coed work.

I had a meeting at the council office this past week, and while I was there I was talking to a group of training chairs from several of the area districts that they all went to training recently where they learned that starting in 2016, EVERY troop will be required to have 2 people with Wilderness First Aid certification.  I know this was required for Philmont etc, but it sounds like starting in 2016 it will be required for all outings.  

First of all is this true? Has anyone else heard this?

If so, can we all complain that this has not been communicated to anyone and it is only 3 months until 2016?   

Will there be a huge number of more WFA classes?  They are only offered 2 times a year in my area, how are all these leaders going to meet this new requirement?

I have discovered that there is a bug in the site, that makes it impossible to view any threads on this site from behind any type of web proxy server.

Behind the proxy server I get this error:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e57'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]

String or binary data would be truncated.

/forums/viewThread.asp, line 80

Without the proxy server, then it works fine and threads can be viewed on the forums.

1) My guess is something your doing with user tracking, or ads or something is not working behind any reasonably proxy server with spam filtering, ad blocking etc..

2) Even when that action fails this should STILL be handled in the website code. This ODBC error means that your trying to insert too many characters into a column in your SQL call. For example, sending a 35-character value to a database column that will only accept 25 characters). You would think that would be simple to fix, using a quick check to make sure your not doing this...see around line 80 in viewThread.asp

We use a proxy server, because we like to filter our internet for our large family of kids. Its insane not to do so these days with young kids. It also allows us to give different levels of access to older kids vs younger.

I don't know if anyone will ever see this message or fix this issue, but if others are having the same problem I guess I can tell them WHY its happening.