Scout: A New Alerting Tool (Beta) for Fed/State Government Info From Sunlight Labs
New from Sunlight Labs.
By the time you read this we will probably already have a few Scout alerts up and running. More later. This resource sounds 100% promising and if Sunlight Labs other resources are any indication, it’s going to be awesome. Btw, Scout is free to access and use.
From a Sunlight Labs Blog Post:
Scout is an alert system for the things you care about in state and national government. It covers Congress, regulations across the whole executive branch, and legislation in all 50 states.
You can set up notifications for new things that match keyword searches. Or, if you find a particular bill you want to keep up with, we can notify you whenever anything interesting happens to it — or is about to.
Notifications via email, SMS, RSS, and JSON. For whatever alerts you set up, we can send emails (either daily digest or as stuff happens) or texts to your phone. We also maintain feeds for any of your alerts so that you can plug them into whatever tools you already use to keep up to date on things.
Searching for keywords and phrases in bills, speeches, and regulations. When you search for a keyword on Scout, it searches through years of text from bills in Congress and the states, speeches given on the floor of Congress, and federal regulations from the entire executive branch. If you narrow your search to a specific set of information, you can add filters. For example, if you’re following the issue of broadcasters putting their public files online, you can set up alerts for regulations from the FCC about the public file.
Read the Complete Blog Post
Direct to Scout
Filed under: News
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.