Welcome to Scout, a new web service from TVW that transforms public access to the State Legislature, state government and Supreme Court – all to keep you better informed about state politics and the public policy debate.
With Scout, you can now track, save, manage and distribute public affairs information and TVW video based upon your preferences.
This step-by-step tutorial will help you learn how to make Scout work for you by tracking the legislation and issues you care most about.
Agents are your digital 'boots on the ground' - they take a set of Targets that you wish to track and then research every event covered by TVW to find the information you're looking for.
On your home screen you will find a list of your Agents and a summary of recent Target activity. This tells you in a glance which Targets have discovered new items since your last visit.
To create an Agent, click 'Add an Agent' in the sidebar. To visit an Agent's Dashboard, click the Agent's name in the sidebar.
An Agent's Dashboard is the place to create and manage the Agent's Targets, browse queued Programs and Documents, send Reports and more.
To create a new Target, click 'Add a Target' in the sidebar. To manage Targets, create Reports, or delete the Agent use the links at the base of the sidebar Target list.
Targets operate continuously in the background, searching for new Programs and Documents that match your search criteria and adding them to their Queue on the Agent's Dashboard.
By default, the Dashboard will display all Programs and Documents queued by all of the Agent's Targets. If you wish to filter down to a specific Target's queue, click the Target name in the sidebar.
An Agent's Target management screen is the place to create Targets, modify their properties, and order them as you see fit.
To create a new Target from this screen, click the 'Add Target' button below the Target list.
To edit or delete a Target, click the appropriate icon to the right. Once a Target was created only it's position, priority, or filters may be modified.
To reorder your Targets, click a Target's name in the list and drag it to it's new position within the priority group.
The Scout Player is a powerful web viewer that allows you to search, view, highlight, save, and share event video and related documents. Player functions are clearly identified, simple and intuitive.
The "clips" function within the player is a tool for finding, highlighting, saving and sharing portions of a video event. When you've found and viewed a section of the event, mark the beginning and end of that section, share it immediately via email or social media like Facebook or Twitter or embed it to another website - and then save it to an "agent cliplist" with a name and summary description for later distribution or review with other "clips" in your "cliplist".
With the Schedule tool you can browse all of the programs TVW covers and queue programs in your Agents for future viewing.
SCOUT allows you to create regular reports, like weekly legislative reports during the session. You can generate global remarks to the summary header. The report is generated automatically from the targets within a search Agent and includes bill number, title and summary. Each target also includes your position on the bill and a bill priority level that you assign. You can also drag and drop a "clip" from the agent "cliplist" and attach it to the target summary or drag and drop a group of clips to the bottom of the report. A report can then be distributed to a distribution list or lists.
You can create a global distribution email list or smaller individual agent distribution lists. Managing these lists is a simple click function.
This page contains all of your account information including distribution lists, subscriptions, account users and other account details. You can quickly change or update your account information on this page.
