{"id":1349,"date":"2011-03-02T00:05:10","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T00:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/?p=1349"},"modified":"2011-03-02T00:05:10","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T00:05:10","slug":"scoutbase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/?p=1349","title":{"rendered":"Scoutbase"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Scout Association has closed down the Scoutbase website this last week and transferred its content to the Member Resources<\/a> section of the main SA site<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scoutbase was the SA\u2019s first presence on the internet and was started way back in 1996! Here is a short history of the site written in 1998, which I lifted from Google\u2019s cache of the site (I guess this will soon go).<\/p>\n

\n

ScoutBase UK — Our own site on the World Wide Web.
A long time ago … in a far away galaxy…<\/p>\n

Oops, that’s another story – but sometimes it feels that way. ScoutBase UK is now well established as the Scout Association’s official Web Site, and this is perhaps as good a time as any to look back at how this communications initiative came into being and why. This is not the place to write a history of the Internet or the World Wide Web (WWW), fascinating though it is.<\/p>\n

No, let’s just accept that there is this enormous network of computers which now covers the whole World and which can be of use to us.
Smoke signals.<\/p>\n

Scouts have always been fascinated by communications, after all the subject was part of our regular training programme for years – hands up all those who still remember a bit of Morse or semaphore.<\/p>\n

It’s hardly surprising then that from the earliest days of home computers you could find Scouts attaching early modems to their Sinclair Spectrums, and starting to communicate with one another by means of electronic bulletin boards. It needed a couple of good solid Scouting character traits to stay with that early technology – patience with the slow and unreliable connections and extreme bravery when it came to facing one’s phone bill! But the pace of technology snowballed and those connections became faster and more reliable, and the phone bills need no longer be life-threatening. Or to put it another way, the time had arrived to put the Scout Association on the Web.<\/p>\n

If you were strong enough to have survived the early IT Strategy papers, you will remember that a presence on the Web was always part of the Association’s forward thinking; but provision of the necessary finance and staffing was another matter. And this is where the story really starts….
The Vision.<\/p>\n

Back in the dark days of the early 1990s (pre – ScoutBase you might say) several Leaders and Venture Scouts were already putting information up on the fledgling Web with a view to assisting others in their day-to-day Scouting, and creating electronic links to exchange ideas and information with other Scouts around the World. It soon became obvious that there was a duplication of effort and considerable scope for confusion. Looking back it now seems incredible that these various efforts could so easily and quickly be brought under one roof; perhaps this says a lot for the ability of Scouts to work together in a common cause.<\/p>\n

The newly formed grouping – which gave its embryo site the name ‘ScoutBase UK’ – then took the step of offering its vision, its services, and the site, to the Scout Association. It wasn’t a walkover – you try living through a four-o-clock in the morning rehearsal for a presentation to the IT Steering Committee! But, finally, in October 1996 the Committee of the Council took the step of accepting ScoutBase UK as the Association’s official Web Site. And this is where the story really starts ….<\/p>\n

The original grouping was of just four individuals, but there was no way they could cope with the vision that was to be ScoutBase UK. Editors were quickly recruited for each of the eight main sections of the Site; they in turn recruited their own staff members. These staff were found from all over the country and contact was (and still is) almost entirely electronic; in a very short space of time ScoutBase had become what was probably one of the earliest ‘virtual’ organisations in the UK, if not the World. It saves the Scout Association a fortune on office space!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So now Scoutbase is no more. Which is a shame. It was the \u2018go to\u2019 place when you needed information no matter how obscure. Of course there were some problems with it, the main one being the searches, which could throw up all sorts of odd results!<\/p>\n

Hopefully its replacement will make finding what you actually want a lot easier!<\/p>\n

Of course, as I\u2019ve mentioned previously, you can always use the the Wayback Machine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scoutbase is no more, long live Scoutbase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Scout Association has closed down the Scoutbase website this last week and transferred its content to the Member Resources section of the main SA site. Scoutbase was the SA\u2019s first presence on the internet and was started way back in 1996! Here is a short history of the site written in 1998, which I … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Scoutbase”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scouts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paTxP-lL","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.nawbus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}