Scouting blog

It's been a long while (again) since my last post. Unfortunately I don't have much to say except to plug another experiment in my life. I've started another blog geared specifically toward my adventures in Boy Scouting. You're all welcome to take the jump with me to Scouting Ahead; however, I realize that most could care less. And that's one of the great motivations for the addition of a new blog rather than continuing the Boy Scouts category. I suspect that the few readers I do have are more interested in the often random events in my life and care less about the Scouting. My other reason for splitting the two aspects of my life digitally is to allow me to brand the Scouting blog for Scouters interested in reading about Scouting (not my latest party or random event) .I will continue to keep this blog as alive as ever (if you call that alive).

first Eagle Scout on my watch

I'm pretty happy right now because I just got back from my first Eagle Scout Board of Review. The young man became the first Eagle Scout while I've been an active adult leader. It makes me proud to know that I've had some influence in his success.

And it just occurred to me that I should probably include this little tidbit: I'm going to become the next Scoutmaster for our troop. I'm really excited and want to hit the ground running when I start in a few weeks so I've been compiling things to say and do for use later on.

ScoutOffice revisited

It's been four months since my (first?) update about ScoutOffice. It's really hit a snag which I'm trying to deal with but seems to be a large deal breaker. Let's see if I can explain this in English.

The BSA launched a software platform called ScoutNET in 1999. It was supposed to be revolutionary and answer our Scouting prayers and probably dispense candy to small children. It failed to do any of those things (I'm still waiting for my M&Ms). However it's still around. It manages to provide some level of backbone on a national level I guess. Councils can submit and request reports from it. Local units are supposed to be able to recharter with it. Yadda yadda.

From best I can tell, back in 1999 and 2000 the BSA allowed only four software vendors access (and subsequent certification) to a ScoutNET api which facilitates the communication between local units and their respective councils.

Since then, two of those vendors have stopped supporting their products leaving two to choose from.

My unit is slowly getting on the technology revolution (they think this Internet thing may be around for a while). And of course I want to gallop and sprint through and make cool stuff happen. I want to frolic (yes and perhaps prance) in the fun of writing software for them! But this stupid ScoutNET certification. /grumble

I've scoured the net trying to figure out what this api is. It looks like it's not publicly available. I'm currently grappling with the idea of writing something that simply imports/exports similarly to the remaining two certified vendors, but that's a hack and it's going to be painstakingly hard.

I just want to the BSA to get off their 1930s attitudes and catch up already.

connecting the theoretical and practical dots of leadership

Last weekend was our first ever "Suriviorman Weekend" for the Boy Scout troop. The wilderness survival event was inspired by the current television shows: Survivorman and Man vs Wild. It was an excellent success.

For our purposes the weekend was a scenario-based competition between patrols. We scored them on obvious categories such as shelter, food, and fire as well as less obvious ones like morale and teamwork.

When judging morale and teamwork, we were looking to see how a group of Scouts worked together. Did they look after each other and cooperate or did they bicker, fight, and hassle one another? Were they able to get done work quickly by coordinating tasks or was everyone fending for themselves? Reflecting now on the weekend, the judges saw an array of responses. One patrol managed to delegate responsibilities. Another did not fare as well since the oldest boys performed all the work leaving the youngest underutilized and bored.

It dawned on me while watching (from afar) these patrols work that we were witnessing differing leadership styles immerge on their own. Some Scouts were content to do all the work at the cost of morale and efficiency. Others had higher performance and were able to delegate, but required less than pleasant tones to motivate others.

So I've been considering the success of the weekend and what I witnessed. I was trying to diagnose how some patrols did better than others and I came across this article at Dumb Little Man. It was while reading the article that I had an epiphany - I understand what had happened: the Scouts were concentrating more on the tasks at hand than the bigger picture of wilderness  survival.

Our event lacked the emotional connection that would inspire Scouts to be good leaders. When the fire competition began, Scouts decided the best way to win that competition. They then choose the best food cooking methods that they believed would earn them the most points. The underlying problem is that there was no incentive to be a good leader - just a good enough leader.

True survival situations require the seven tips as discussed in the article. Morale will be affected by how well the leader motivates and inspires others to strive toward goals. And morale is one hell of an ally in tough situations - even more so than dry socks!

So how do you bridge the gap? I wish I knew! I can't drop the Scouts in a jungle just to see them actually have to work together (although that would be amusing). I think you can start with having a healthy discussion about the good and bad things that happened.

What do you think? How do you bring the emotional desire to perform good, high-leveled leadership to an event?

ScoutNet .. err... I mean ScoutOffice

One of the current side projects I'm working on is developing a website for my Boy Scout Troop. Scouting is defiantly and dismally in the stone age. It's pretty depressing. So I started working on this website. I think it should cover both the public-facing aspects as well as be a record keeping tool.

I've actually started and stopped work on the project several times over the past few years. That's the thing about my side projects... they rarely make it to completion. It's a nice fad for a period of time, but the novelty eventually wears off and some new obsession takes its place. Hopefully I can be a little more committed to this one.

I would like to continue reporting my progress in my blog. Sort of a development diary. I love those YouTube videos that show someone's progress building a huge Lego structure over time. The closest approximation to that I can make (without opening the project source and having it make much less appeal to a reader) is here I suppose. Perhaps someday the project will merit its own site.

So one of the first things to conquer is the tool set. I've been fighting with them for a day or two. I have a few major requirements:

• stay legit (don't pirate),
• WYSIWYG (or at least the Cassini developers' web server) web form editing,
  
• and have the ability to unit test the most code possible.

I started with Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express. It covers the first two requirements. However it does not (or I have not found a way to) compile the site into dlls. What's the problem? You can't unit test a project that can't create dlls. At least that's how NUnit works. Perhaps there's another free .NET unit testing platform that can somehow negotiate web projects.

I fired up Microsoft Visual C# Developer Express. This would give me the first and third requirements. I was even able to publish the class library dlls into the web project! However it was really a sloppy mess and it didn't feel right.

While doing some reading I stumbled across sharpDevelop, a free and open developers' IDE. It said it offered WYSIWYG form development and the ability to compile web projects. I could sense my dreams coming true. Boy I was off! I run it for the first time and instantly feel like I'm using a horrible knock-off. It has integrated NUnit testing and some other nice features. However upon closer examination, I see it does not do web form development - it does windows form development. I merely dabble in ASP.NET. I need some WYSIWYG or Cassini action!

So back to the Web Dev/C# Dev I went. I fought with the solution and project files for a good while. I managed to get them into locations I can cope with. I have the web form editing and the unit testing. All is well with the world.

Two other issues presented themselves while working last night however. I needed to name the solution! Naming a solution often correlates to the name of the "product" itself. I really wanted to name it ScoutNet (a la Terminator movies) however BSA actually has a (really crappy) platform called that (don't worry - we're in no danger). With that name taken, the next best thing I could think of was ScoutOffice. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft comes knocking on my door (/eyes).

The other issue I found was a bit more technical. I started working on membership functionality first. I wanted to create new users. And I was trying to be slick and override the System.Web.Security.MembershipProvider since that's supposed to be an easy route to insta-membership functionality. It is pretty slick, but it requires I use the System.Web.Security.MembershipUser. Ok, so I make my user a child of that. But by doing so, I set up the dependency that all of my lower tier projects need System.Web. That's just not acceptable. So I guess I'll be writing the membership functionality by hand.

Since this is sort of the inaugural post regarding ScoutOffice, if there are any readers out there let me know what you think. If you have any features that you think would be cool to add pass them along.

boy scout by-laws

Not sure if I ever posted about it in the past, but I'm on a "task force" for the troop to document and publish the troop's by-laws. It's been a really interesting experience thus far. I've gotten to look at the adult history of the troop in ways I never have before. We've been examining the minutes of committee meetings back to 1999!

We're definitely making progress and I hope that our work will reunite and bind the troop as we move forward.

Of course part of the minutes uncovered a failed attempt to get a troop website going. I'm sure I'll be heading that one once we get back on our feet again. It may sound like I'm not looking forward to it, but I am - the website development aspect at least. I'm not looking forward to trying to satisfy a room full of parents all with different opinions about the internet. Some don't use it. Some think it's the devil. Others are a tad more liberal. Finding the common medium will be fun.