What is TAPO?TAPO stands for Troops and Packs Online. The TAPO is establishing a global resource for the exchanging of ideas and information about the Boy and Girl Scout Programs offered by the Boy Scouts of America as well as the Girl Scouts of the USA and other Scouting organizations around the world.
The History of the TAPO?
The original Exploring Web Site was started by two long time members of the Scouting and Exploring Program in the St. Louis, Missouri area as a way of trying to give back to the exploring program. The site was designed to give any Explorer Post the ability to create a FREE web site for their unit as well as being a central recource for Exploring related information.
When we first started this service it was located on a computer which was owned by one of the creators of this site. As time has gone on we have upgraded and are still in the process of doing just that! We have created this service using all donated materials ( a server and a direct connection to the internet from an ISP ).
The site was created in June of 1997 and has grown ever since. A short time later the Exploring program was restructured to now include Venturing. We were able to obtain the venturing.org address to add to the exploring.org one that we started with. The addition of the Venturing information expanded our services to now include 'crews' as well as 'posts'.
The newest change for the Exploring / Venturing Online web site was the changing of the name to EVO to make it easier for people to talk about it as well as to promote it. The site was completely re-designed, layout and data structure in July of 2000. The new design allows us to offer a Council directory which is not available anywhere else, Sea Scouting information, and new directories for crews and ships. With updates like these, the future of the EVO looks great!
Since the great success of EVO was noticed...and with much demand from EVO users the TAPO service was dreamed up in the early part of 2001. The site launched on June 8th with several units already listed. Many users were looking for a great free resource for their Scout Troops and Cub Packs as well so using our resources and technology we decided to expand our services to give these groups the same resources. We registered www.scouttroop.org and www.cubpacks.org to be the new home for this new service. We hope to be a very useful resource for Scouting Units around the world.
This electronic web publication is NOT approved, sanctioned, nor reviewed by the Boy Scouts of America or the Girl Scouts of the USA, and therefore should NOT be considered an official publication of that organization.
Public Notice: To discourage unsolicited e-mail to TAPO customers, senders of unsolicited e-mail; (notably business solicitations, chain mail or X-rated mail) will be charged $250 per occurance for delivery of such e-mail to TAPO (www.scouttroop.org, www.scouttroops.org, www.cubpack.org & www.cubpacks.org) users.
Some of the new changes that have taken place have been the change in leadership for the site. One of the founding creators of the site is now the new webmaster and is in the process of forming a committee to help maintain the site. The new leadership should ensure that the site will be maintained in a more timely fashion than before. Also new to the site is the addition of a dynamic database for the listing of all of the units and easier creation of accounts. Also we have included the addition of an online web board to post messages to other members and an online guestbook for all to sign.
The site was maintained by the same two advisors up until March of 1999 when one of the founders could not devote as much of his time to the site as he would have liked, so it was given to the other co-creator, Chris Diamond to maintain. In March of 1999 the server was moved to its new location at an ISP in St. Louis, Missouri where it could be connected directly to the Internet using one of their DS3 connections. This has provided quicker download times and many of the features that were on the drawing board.
Is the TAPO an Official BSA Site?
To answer that as simply as possible, No! We are NOT not an official BSA or GSUSA web site. When the site was first created we were willing to be a partner with the BSA giving them a resource to advertise the Exploring / Venturing programs. Due to a policy that they set, they could not sponsor any web site that had links to unit's web sites. The policy only allowed units web sites to link to either their councils web site or to the national site. They would not be able to give a link back. This resulted in no collection of resources of links to units web sites anywhere except for some select search engines such as Yahoo. We wanted to provide a resource that the BSA was not willing to offer, and to this day, still will not!
