Open source software for BSA

[lanceroy 10]

"The Boy Scouts of America are looking to the open-source community for help in building software, to use for fundraisers, special events, and other functions, for their more than 121,000 local scout troops. Some open source advocates, who are former Boy Scouts, support the idea, despite a few reservations. According to the article, there are no plans for a scout merit badge in open source but there has been a merit badge in computers since 1967, 'and it is possible that if the program is successful, it could eventually be used by IT-savvy scouts themselves.'"

 

From Slashdot

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/10/1739257&from=rss

[John-in-KC 311]

https://opensource.scouting.org/

 

[ rant ]

 

Another opportunity to feel the love for the folks at the National IT shop. They can't even post the correct, current certificate so your box handshakes encrypted with their servers.

 

The irony of this is they're asking developers to step up to the plate and help the effort... and they can't get something as simple as the correct domain on the certificate right.

 

For more fun, the library is empty. The proposals are empty. Reeks of "we'll know what we want when we see it" management.

 

Take a look at the usage stats: https://opensource.scouting.org/usage/

Quick blip in May, but 1/3 through June, National IT is not on track to get anything really going.

 

One of the keypeople at USScouts came to our OA winter banquet a couple years back. You'd think National IT has some vague idea of who is doing what in software and webwork for Scouting these days. You think they'd put together a consulting community with some named players as they roll out this initiative.

 

Yes, this goes right along with MyScouting.

 

[ /rant ]

 

 

[crazyhorse 10]

Hi all, hope my first post here could be interesting :-)

First of all, sorry for my english: I'm italian, and I know that my english is not so good.

I'm the project leader of OpenScout http://www.openscout.org , a global project started four years ago in Italy in the official AGESCI forum (AGESCI is the first italian and catholic scout association).

As you can read in our website, our goal is to "Spread the free software culture in Scouting". In other words, we are a nonprofit community of Scouts and/or ex Scouts having in common the interest for the operating system GNU/Linux and for free software in general. It is an independent community, without economic, political, commercial and above all associative links (more info are in our manifesto: http://www.openscout.org/info/).

As you can read in our official wiki http://www.openscout.org/wiki/ , we are currently working in some different projects, like as:

* WinScout - A managerial software for Scout troops

* Jambian - A GNU/Linux distribution (live and installable) customized for Scouts.

* The OpenScout CD - A customized version of the TheOpenCD

* ScoutLink Coders - A Project dedicated to develop the Ircd and Services daemon for the Scoutlink Network.

* FreeSoftware - A project dedicated to our free Scout software and utilities made by our developers.

* Biblioteca (Library) - A little collection of documents, articles and other things related to the Free Software and to Scouting

* Grafichiamo ( - A project dedicated to graphic customization

* WebChat - A Project dedicated to WebChat and Services daemon for the Scoutlink Network.

* Progetti Esterni - Page dedicated to the other projects related to Scouting and Free Software, not included into this wiki, but linked with it.

* Jota/Joti - Special external project: Support for Jota/Joti

With this post I want to share with you this project, and if possible also to know if somebody want to cooperate with it

 

Hope it can interest all of you

 

Yours in scouting

CrazyHorse

www.openscout.org

 

[John-in-KC 311]

BSA's open source pages are dead links now. That can mean the project is dead, or it can mean the project has moved elsewhere in the BSA domain...

[mmhardy 10]

Here is the original story

 

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9095238

[fleetfootedfox 10]

crazyhorse, The English in your posting is fine. I wish I could say the same for you wiki site, but I'm sure that will improve.

 

I am assuming that there are enough differences in Scouting between different countries that international advancement tracking software would be difficult. My troop uses software called Troopmaster. It is not free but is affordable and apparently meets the troop's needs quite well. There seem to be various others on the market and some free ones. There is even a free spreadsheet solution called ScoutTrax.

 

Some of these other projects you mention sound interesting, but probably not enough demand to make them go very far. A Scout-specific Linux distro seems pretty pointless. Where is the demand for such a thing?

[crazyhorse 10]

@Scouters: yes, for sure there are a lot of differences in Scouting between different countries, as example I can tell you that only in Italy there are a lot of differences between different associations and we are in the same country...but this is why we are trying to find cooperation in different countries: maybe it could be possible to have a "core" software we can expand with some plugins.

As we wrote in our wiki, there are a lot of standard funtions that we think are common in scouting (scouting life managing, for example...)

I've already found Troopmaster, it looks like the italian software used in AGESCI (called Isola). Unfortunately we tried to keep in contact with AGESCI responsible, but nobody replied us...now I'll take a look also in ScoutTrax, we need to know scout leader's needs.

 

About Linux distro uselessness: maybe there isn't a demand for such a thing, but this isn't our mission (to respond a market demand). We want to spread the free software culture in Scouting, and sincerely I don't know a better tool than a distro customized for scouting needs :-)

[John-in-KC 311]

mmhardy:

 

The computerworld article is still online; the hyperlink ( http://opensource.scouting.org/ ) is dead.

 

To quote Dr McCoy:

 

It's dead, Jim!

 

Jim, it's dead!

 

Captain, it's dead!

 

It's dead, Captain!

 

It must be dead!

 

Let it go Jim, it's dead!