Design Goals

Election Management Tool

Rationale

The chapters of the lodge and the lodge election committee and recordkeeper need an efficient way to track the election process and tools to help those elections go smoothly. Following up on elections that either haven’t been completed or were completed and never reported has been an ongoing challenge.

Design Goals

1. Start with a list of known chartered “Boy Scout” and “LDS Boy Scout” troops in the field service council that are not ScoutReach units. This data will need to come from ScoutNet one way or another (even if it means someone getting an Excel export from ScoutNet and hand-entering it, which is what we did this year). Contact information for the registered ScoutMaster (and perhaps the Committee Chair or ASMs) will be needed for use in contacting troops that don’t submit their own schedule request.
2. Send email to the registered Scoutmaster (perhaps SM and Committee Chair?) of each troop with the necessary login information required to access their troop’s information within the election system.
3. Allow Scoutmasters to submit requested election dates and provide information about the scouts who are eligible to be elected. Bonus points if we can pull their troop data from ScoutNet (all scouts First Class and above) and let them pick the members who are eligible (because this will automatically get us all of their data without the Scoutmaster having to enter it all). Double bonus points if the SM has the ability to override the rank information (because it perhaps has not yet been entered into Internet Advancement and passed on to the council) but make it clear that it’s an override - and that they need to enter the advancement information into Internet Advancement… make sure that we show them that the unit is the one responsible for validating that the scout has met the camping requirement (not something the website or lodge can validate anyway).
4. Allow election teams to claim ownership of an election, set a date for it, and generate ballots and election forms based on the data entered by the ScoutMaster.
5. Allow election teams and lodge and chapter leadership to see which troops have and have not yet scheduled elections, and which troops have and have not completed them.
6. Allow BOTH the election team and the Scoutmaster to independently report the results of the election by viewing the list of eligible candidates created earlier and checking off the ones who were elected. This serves as a cross-check to make sure the results are correct, and also gives us a backup method to get the results if one of the two forgets to enter it.
7. When the election result entry is completed, it should tell them how many adults they are eligible to nominate from their troop, and offer to allow nominations of adults to be submitted from those registered with the unit that are not members of the lodge (although they may be listed as “non-members” within the OALM software. This should not be required to be entered at the same time, as they may not have known they could, and would need to take it back to their troop committee first. The election should be considered completed even without adult nominations as that is a separate process, but we still want the election management software to handle collecting the nominations.
8. Allow export of the data about members who were elected to OA LodgeMaster. Directly adding them to the OALM database would be awesome, but a CSV or XLS export of the data would be useable. For flexibility we should be able to export data from a specific election or elections that have been entered since the last time we did an export, and not just everything in one shot. The export file needs to use column names that will be automatically matched by OALM.