New laws and changes in existing ones can dramatically affect the ways that government is accountable to the citizens it is supposed to serve.

Keeping track of those changes -- at both the state and national level -- can be a daunting task. We're adding access to a tool on the State Integrity Investigation website today that makes that task signficantly easier.

With Scout, you can keep track of legislation on subjects that matter to you, create alerts so that you will automatically be notified of changes in the status of a bill and share your searches with others. 

Scout was created by the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan organization that uses the power of the internet and digital tools to work for government openness and transparency. It tracks legislation on both the state and national level; the service is free.

To use Scout, you access the search box in the right column of this site, below this post. You can type in a word or phrase on any subject (try "intellectual property'' for a test) and Scout will return results on legislation in Congress, speeches in Congress and legislation in the states on that subject. If you enter Scout from a state page on the site, your search will return information specific to that state. You then can create an alert, so that you'll automatically be notified about new developments on that topic. You can learn more on the Scout website here.

We'll be telling you more about Scout, the thinking behind it, how it is being used and how you can make it work for you throughout the week.