Open Scout API

Open, versioned, machine-readable Scouting America reference data. v0.66.0 · built 2026-09-11T17:28:14+00:00

Unofficial community project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Scouting America. Data licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

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The cookbook is runnable, CI-gated example code in Python, TypeScript, C#, SQL and shell. Each recipe kills one specific way this data misleads a consumer who assumes it is a flat snapshot — because the interesting part is that it is not.

• Live camp map — every camp, plotted honestly: approximate coordinates are drawn as areas rather than pins, co-located camps collapse to one reservation marker, and the feature filter expands a coarse code over its hierarchy.
• Feature codes are hierarchical: a camp offering kayaking is never tagged aquatics, so a filter must expand the coarse code over its children.
• eagle_required is null for historical badges — unknown, not false. A falsy test quietly reclassifies them.
• Merit badge popularity is ordinal: no absolute count is published anywhere, so averaging or summing a rank is meaningless.
• An empty features array means nothing without features_verified_at beside it — never surveyed and surveyed-found-nothing are different facts.
• Names, numbers and ownership live in effective-dated versions, and mergers and renames are events; versions[0] is not “current”.

Datasets

228 current councils across 14 Council Service Territories; 553 current camps; 140 current merit badges; 139 Cub Scout adventures; 292 current requirement sets; 21 ranks; 52 awards; 238 OA lodges.

Endpoints

• v1/meta.json — version, counts, license
• v1/current/councils.json — flat current council list
• v1/current/territories.json
• v1/current/merit-badges.json — flat current merit badge list
• v1/councils/index.json — all councils (incl. historical)
• v1/councils/<id>.json — one council with its lifecycle events
• v1/territories/index.json · v1/territories/<id>.json
• v1/merit-badges/index.json · v1/merit-badges/<id>.json
• v1/requirement-sets/index.json · v1/requirement-sets/<id>.json — requirement trees
• v1/camps/index.json · v1/camps/<id>.json — resident/HA/day/short-term camps
• v1/current/camps.json — flat current camp list, with program features
• v1/ranks/index.json · v1/ranks/<id>.json — Scouts BSA ranks
• v1/awards/index.json · v1/awards/<id>.json — awards & recognitions (knots, honors, training)
• v1/oa-lodges/index.json · v1/oa-lodges/<id>.json — Order of the Arrow lodges (by council)
• v1/merit-badge-rankings/index.json · v1/merit-badge-rankings/<year>.json — merit badge popularity by year (ranks, not counts)
• v1/adventures/index.json · v1/adventures/<id>.json — Cub Scout adventures (the unit of Cub advancement)
• schema/v1/ — JSON Schemas

Merit-badge, rank and Cub adventure requirement text is © Scouting America, reproduced with attribution for non-commercial use and not covered by the dataset license (see NOTICE).

Source & issues: github.com/sethmay/open-scout-api