Eric Mill says:

The easiest way to start off using Scout is to show up to the homepage and type a keyword or phrase into the search box. It’ll search over everything all at once. You can either create an alert right away by hitting the “Create Alert” button, or you can first narrow and filter the search down to what you’re really looking for. Whatever search you see in front of you when you hit the “Create Alert” button is what we’ll notify you about new results for.

Eric Mill says:

Oops, I got cut off – what I meant to end with is:

As an aside – we do have a particular kind of “smart search” around citations of the law (the US Code), so if you search for “5 USC 552”, you’ll receive results where that piece of law is cited in various formats, whether or not it matches your exact search:

https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/search/federal_bills/5%20usc%20552

Eric Mill says:

I should also add that we do have some specific intelligence around “popular names” for some legislation. For example, the term “Obamacare” never appears in the text or title of the big health care reform bills of 2010. However, a search for “obamacare” will return PPACA and the accompanying Reconciliation Act:

https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/search/federal_bills/obamacare

Eric Mill says:

Yes, I built in that feature with “obamacare” in mind. Other popular terms we have special searches for include “CISPA”, “SOPA”, and “PIPA”. This is less of a power user feature, and more to make the site make more intuitive sense to someone who’s testing it out, or simply has a broader interest in what they know of as Obamacare, even if they don’t know the official names or bill numbers of the original legislation.

Congress tries to keep up with popular names of legislation, but it’s often slow. It was frustrating to me that, for a while, the word “SOPA” never appeared anywhere in the official data around the Stop Online Piracy Act, so you could go to THOMAS.gov and type in “sopa” and get nothing. Eventually, the Library of Congress added “SOPA” as an official nickname for the bill, but by the time they did the public fight over the legislation had ended.

We accomplished this through extremely simple means: maintaining a spreadsheet that links popular names to specific bill numbers. We make this spreadsheet public and welcome contributions. You can find more details about this here:

http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2012/data-for-better-bill-searching/

Eric Mill says:

I guess the answer to what kind of power users I mean is: all of the above. Our goals are to make it possible to carve very specific searches that minimize the number of false positives you have to sift through, while also making it quick and easy to just sign up for a large number of alerts about everything. These goals actually tend not to be in tension, but we’re definitely looking for feedback on how to do both of these better, and to make it easier to manage large numbers of alerts.

Scout is primarily pitched to the audience of people who might love to have a subscription to an expensive pay service on government activity, but don’t have the budget. Political intelligence services, such as Bloomberg Government and CQ Roll Call, are extremely lucrative and powerful – to the point that they very nearly became regulated under the STOCK Act (an amendment that removed these regulatory provisions passed near the end of the legislative process).

For more on that: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/03/22/stock-act-passes-bill-on-political-intelligence-firms-to-be-introduced/

Eric Mill says:

I wasn’t aware of any specific issues around setting up RSS feeds for alerts, but depending on the particular time when it happened, it’s certainly possible there was a bug or outage of some kind, they do occasionally happen. I’m glad that it’s been resolved – and David, you can always email [email protected] for support with technical issues.

How and whether we integrate Scout with our Open States app for iOS (http://itunes.apple.com/app/open-states/id500672932?mt=8) is more up to our Open States team than it is to me – I work closely with them, but it is a separate project. That said, it’s something we’ve talked about and there’s no clear answer yet. They may wish to do more kinds of alerts in the Open States iPad app than Scout supports.

For example, our Congress app for Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sunlightlabs.android.congress), which I built and was an inspiration for Scout, contains alerts for tweets, videos, and news mentions, which aren’t currently supported by Scout. There are other technical complications of how this integration might be accomplished, but that’s the main issue to think about.

Eric Mill says:

That’s an excellent question. We invested a lot of time into Scout, and so we certainly wanted to have some confidence that it would be useful to other people.

In Scout’s case, we learned what users wanted in two main ways – firstly, by being those users ourselves. We are an advocacy group that follows all kinds of legislation and regulation in federal and state government, and so we very much wanted something that would scratch our own itches.

The other way is by observing the success and use of the app I mentioned in a previous comment, Congress for Android. It began as an experiment of mine that I did on a whim, without expectations of much success – but it turned out to be a great success, and has almost half a million downloads to date. More importantly, our users were clearly comprised of both ordinary citizens and professionals who carried it with them on the Hill. It was gratifying that something could be attractive to both ends of the spectrum of expertise.

Finally, it turned out that push notifications were a very popular feature, and so we learned that people of all sorts want to keep their finger on the pulse of what their government is doing.

Eric Mill says:

Most immediately, we want to expand what information is there: there are tons of reports, memos, filings, and executive orders that we’d like to make as easy to search and be notified of as bills and regulations. This includes reports from the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, Statements of Administration Policy, memos from the Office of Management and Budget, and whatever other reports that we find or people tell us is useful to their work.

As I mentioned earlier, I’d like to work on expanding on how smart our searches can be, in a thoughtful way. I’d like to expand what we did with US Code citations to include citations to the Code of Federal Regulations, and direct references to previously passed legislation. We can also be smarter about how we handle searches that users expect to “just work”, like state names and abbreviations, bill numbers, names of Congresspersons, and more.