Oh yeah, I am not just ranting here, I plan on sending a letter to Keith Christopher, National Director, Sea Scouts, BSA. What do you think though? Should it be an actual letter in the mail, an email, or a phone call?

Being inland, we don't have any sea scouts in our district. But, I think you should speak up..

I personally never heard of you until someone who went to a ECOH and they had the eagles stand and say when they earned eagle. One of the participants said he was a sea scout. I thought it was a program that was no-more (he was an older gentlemen)..

Then I heard of it again as an active program maybe last year..

You are under represented.

Either e-mail, phone call or letter?

How about all three? Make the phone call, follow up with an e-mail summarizing the phone call, expanding or answering points raised, and raising any new points since the call. Follow that with a letter copied to others at National including the Chief Scout and National President.

Sailing,

If you haven't met Keith yet, and I think you did at Jambo, you will know that he is a good bloke and WILL bring this to the appropriate attention. He's a great guy, and gets things done. if you email he will respond. If you snail mail, it may take longer, but he will respond.

Yeah, I met him twice now, that is why I know he is the person to talk to. I have his card, so I have his his email and phone number and I can find the address online. If you think he will respond to an email then that is what I will send.

Sailing,

Trust me he will respond. It may be a short note saying that he will tell the appropriate folks, or in my case telling me his assistant will be sending me a copy of the new training., but he will respond.

I had the pleasure of knowing Keith when he was a DSS in New Orleans. He helped do a lot for that council's programs and facilities.

It's


Here's a beautiful sampling of prose from scouting.org.

For more infomration[sic] about the Sea Scouts, including how to join or start a Sea Scout ship in your area, please contact your local council service center.

Sea Scouts learn to maintain and operate then[sic] vessel,

courses are taught with the ship by our own officers. Seems like this was cut and pasted from some ship's website.

This page (http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/Venturing/venturinglocator.aspx) is actually better, although it wasn't working at all under IE for me. But under Safari, it gave me a list of all of the crews (26) and ships (3) in our council. The crew list here is definitely out-of-date, though. Sigh...

So many things to talk about when you talk about National and IT... I love this link:
"■NEW! 2009 Philmont Training Center Conference Schedule " (http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/Venturing.aspx)

So there are definitely more than 3 sentences about Sea Scouting on scouting.org, but it's missing from some key spots (and oddly represented in others).

At least you have something you can do about it.

That is one of the better lists I have seen. Only a couple of inaccuracies that I know of. The biggest problem that I see is that they only list the council contact info, and at least for the councils in the San Francisco area there is no mention of Sea Scouting on there websites. It is even hard to find info about Venturing on some of the sites.

How do you get to this page from www.scouting.org? I looked a little but in 10 minutes I was unable to find a pathway there. If I, even knowing exactly what page I am looking for, can't find this then how is the general public going to find it?

Well, that list is still not good. They show no ships in the South Florida council. That is most definitely completely wrong. I am in one ship there, and have seen 3 others.

Gulf Stream council only shows 2 out of the 5 ships.

The Locator did a decent job for the Crews, not so well for the Ships, unfortunately.

I got to the page by googling Sea Scouts site:scouting.org.

That is, granted, not necessarily the way the general public is going to think to look for Sea Scout ships. It can be done, but it doesn't look like this is the intended way to get such a list. It looks like it's a leftover page. The right answer is going to be to get Sea Scout ships included on beascout.org.

The scouting.org website is frought with data-flow problems. So, when you call, ask if there's a way you can be part of the solution. Your council Venturing Officer's Association could use the leadership, I'm sure.

I found it really hard to work with Sitecore (the BSA backbone), thus our "new" council website is painfully lacking. I'm still a successful page deployment away from being able to train our VOA secretary in using it.

"when you call, ask if there's a way you can be part of the solution."

Actually, I am considering putting in an application to be the National Boatswain for 2011-2012. I don't know much about web development, but I am a pretty good speaker. That would be one way to help out and play to my strengths.

Good luck with that application! I think you'll be in as good a position as any to resolve this specific problem.

Making the invisible visible is a matter of finding out how data moves from a ship's paper charter to the list of data the web page calls upon to make its map.

That means making a few (maybe a lot) of phone calls and getting to know who does what. In the process, you may find out who to put in touch with whom to make things work even better.

Sounds like you just got a plank in your platform!