What Would Your Ideal Leader Software Do?

Ok, first to take into account what has been said on other topics: not everyone is online. I understand that, I see it at my own area commissioner meetings.

Putting that aside, let's assume you are online, you're a leader, and you want to take up less time on the mundane and repetitive parts of your role. Using that as a premise, what would you want in an application geared toward leaders?

Personally I'd want it online, so I could access it anywhere (but of course secure enough to protect the information I was storing within it).

I'd want to know who was in my organization, who are my youth, who are my leaders, who is registered officially and who is not (and why not). I'd want to be able to move youth around from pack to pack and from Cubs to Scouts easily. I'd also want to be able to easily pull in a youth who moved into the area and was already registered elsewhere.

I'd want to easily track youth progress. I'd love to click on a youth and find out what they still need for their Chief Scout/Queen's Venturers/etc. See which badges they have and which they do not. I'd also like to easily see which badges no youth/few youth have so that I know which activities would have maximum benefit.

I'd like to easily manage camps by having a list of venues that I could search for facilities/activities/availability, get automatic forms printed, be able to check off which youth were coming, compare that to which have their paperwork in so that by going to one page I see highlighted what needs to be done before the camp can happen.

I'd like it integrated into ways I can communicate with youth/leaders/parents. The first part of this is of course email, and ideally it would let me know if they have opened/clicked on the message. I'd like to see logins for youth and parents where they can go and see their (youth's) progress, see details of camps, etc.

I'd also like to see connections to social media. Anyone who uses Facebook knows that often the user's walls are full of notices of achievements in the various Facebook games, well imagine if the youth linked their Facebook into the system: you log in, go to achievement tracking, check off that they earned X Badge. Their Facebook wall now has a post announcing their achievement with an icon of the badge they earned. Now their extended family and their friends know what they are doing in scouting and who knows, perhaps a friend who sees what they are doing gets interested. I'd even say you could have the info about camps they are going on show up.

Now I ask for two reasons, one is that I think MMS2 could do a lot of this, but also because I think that the gaps could be filled in by a project deveoped by the scouting community, so let me know what you would want to see.

It would be more work for the leaders to enter all this information into a site but it would be a wonderful tool to help with in planning meeting to see who has what badges and what is needed . This would be well worth the extra work.

Thanks

Just curious, are you using, or did you ever use, the Scoutsys software for tracking the badges and provides the information you're mentioning. The software is still available but hasn't been updated in awhile.

Garth

Yes, but what I want to see is something online, something that you could just pull out your smartphone and check any time, perhaps when a meeting completes you just grab an achievement and check off each boy who qualified, and everything is updated. Also something where youth and parents can get in and look as well, increasing how engaged they are compared to an app on someone's desktop. Of course, active development would be good too.

I've got an online application that is not 100% finished but it basically allows youth, parents, and leaders to manage badges. If you'd like to try it out and see if it's any use to you, please feel free to send me a message.

This is deffinatly somthing that we need to develop over the next while. There is so much great stuff that should be developed to keep scouts up to date that we need to have a commity of volunteers work on projects like this so that the limited IT staff at SC can focus on the higher priority items and we can get these systems working (sooner).

I don't see it as being any more data entry as most leaders are already doing this (with the exception of badges). The only thing is that leaders are doing it in MS word, MS Excle and google instead of MMS as the user interface is so much nicer.

Intagrating the badges into facebook would be great advertising for us. And would be worth the extra data entry especaily for larger groups.

It would be great if we could intagrate the calendar into the youth login that filters by events they are eligable for and allows them to click to sign up.

Version 3 or 4 could intagrate with PBO to recomend activitys based on badges that need work.

Well, the new MMS is an off the shelf system w/ an fairly well documented API if I'm getting the blurbs correctly. As such, it should be possible to extend MMS to add in the functionality and build off of things there to really reduce data entry / simplify things.

Producing "camp paks" w/ medical info, a log of the paperwork (let's electronically document the camp request form) etc can rally be tied into one common database. Let's use the database rather than trying to lock users out of it.

Usual disclaimer, a lot of privacy implications, they'd need to be worked out, maybe present a limited subset to the third party apps.. name / section / awards possibly - but at least get some of the data out there to avoid copy/paste like we are doing right now.

Does anyone happen to know the name of the software or approximate release date?

Be nice if the new soft ware could actually deliver the reports that are shown now on MMS and usually can not be accessed.

I don't see it as being any more data entry as most leaders are already doing this (with the exception of badges).

According to my groups new registrar, the previous person failed to enter in the information into the MMS at all or totally incorrectly. This ended with someone else having to go through and correct our entire groups information set. Each member had to be removed, added and processed. So it would be great if these people who do not have a clue what they are doing... stop, look and ask!

Does anyone happen to know the name of the software or approximate release date?

In a super hero voice... Eventually!

Be nice if the new soft ware could actually deliver the reports that are shown now on MMS and usually can not be accessed.

Dear Errol; You are asking too much! It can never be that easy... Sincerely, Everyone else.

I have found, what has the potential of being a great communication and management tool for groups on a individual basis to use. It's a online program that is built for an individual troop (USA) to manage communication within itself, along with other management tools. This online software is not a perfect solution, but it has potential to ease the work load of a scouter, or even a group committee when having to deal with the many aspects of running a troop/group. You can find it at the following link:

http://www.myscoutlink.com/index.pl

Our troup started using that software this year. So far it is working alright. It does not quite allow for our system of badge requirements.

I found this by a lucky search (I can't find links to it anyware)
http://www.scouts.ca/dnn/info/Home/June ... fault.aspx

It would appear that SC is working on developing a simular software suite. So over the Christmas break I'll take my ideas for starting up a technology service crew and see how they can assist with the current project. I just wish I had known that they were working on this in the spring. There is no indication in the action plan of this huge and much needed project.