Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data

Opening a Dialog on New York State Legislation

Innovative things on the transparency front continue to emerge from Albany, thanks to the crew working for the NY Senate CIO. The latest – an Open Legislation portal that allows New Yorkers to search for bills by sponsor, status or keyword and to initiate a dialog on bills.

Users of the site can comment on bills as a guest commenter – by leaving name, email and (optionally) web site information – or by logging in via OpenID, Facebook Connect or several other services.

What is especially intriguing is the ability to send trackbacks – so blog discussions on bills are incorporated into the comment history. For example, a quick search in the Open Legislation portal on “text messaging” produces A2280. because Vox Populi uses WordPress, I can specify a trackback URL to this bill so that this post will be incorporated into the comment history. Very cool!

Keep your eyes peeled for even more good stuff coming out of the NY Senate in Albany in the future.

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About Me

I am the former Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia. I also served as Director of Government Relations at Code for America, and as Director of the State of Delaware’s Government Information Center. For about six years, I served in the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), and helped pioneer their work with state and local governments. I also led platform evangelism efforts for TTS’ cloud platform, which supports over 30 critical federal agency systems.

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