Prize giving: Stick Together Competition

Remember our Stick Together Competition at Peak 2010? Well last week we headed down to Melbourne Scouts Scout Hut just south of Derby to present the winners with their haul of prizes!

Tom from Blacks and Rob from Skowt spent an hour with a very enthusiastic Scout Troop and enjoyed talking about Peak and their 1st prize winning creation – The Peak Penknife.

Tom gave a talk on taking care of walking gear and we ran a quiz with a load more great prizes from Blacks up for grabs.

Thanks for great evening Melbourne Scouts and once again well done on winning over £250 worth of kit for your Group!

You get what you pay for?

With the loss of the leading provider of free web hosting for Scouting websites, a lot of people are looking for the next best thing. As much as we appreciate the obvious attraction of a free service we can’t help but wonder what the future holds and if anything is really free?

They say the best things in life are free. As lovers of the great outdoors no one appreciates a breath of fresh air or a ray of sunshine on a gloomy day more than us. These are the things that the proverbial they are referring to; I wonder though if this covers free software.

As a provider of Software as a Service we at Skowt are often complimented about our product but are sometimes met with the expectation that the service is free. Although Skowt is free for users and parents there is a subscription fee for Groups/Units.

The problem with some free services is that the software is created, put online and then becomes static. This can leave users with an array of problems but no means of complaint. Problems include unreliability, technical difficulties and lengthy downtimes to name just a few. These problems do vary from service to service but they all root back to the same cause, there are only so many hours in a day and only so much any of us can do as volunteers. Once the software development is finished the developer is no longer interested in its maintenance, for them the challenge and enjoyment was in creating the product. They have little interest for routine and mundane maintenance. That’s not to say they don’t care it’s just the incentive to support might not be as great as the incentive to create.

At Skowt we truly believe in our product and want to be able to provide on going support, and development. We dream of Skowt becoming more than a service, for it to flourish into a community where like minded individuals can interact, communicate and voice ideas. Our commitment to Skowt is to constantly and effectively develop our service whilst being on hand to deal with any problems our users may encounter. These provisions of support will allow all Leaders to move online, whether you have little knowledge of the internet or you design and create your own web content. By funding these resources with regular subscriptions our members liberate us to provide a constant, reliable and innovative service.

Happy Skowting!

Leanne – Chief Blogger