Open Source Senate

By Zack Seward

Rochester, NY – People are constantly calling state senators' offices. They have questions about unemployment, business permits, pot holes. And now, there's an app for that.

The New York State Senate rolled out a smartphone app last month. Using your phone's GPS, you can find out who represents you in the capital, and with a couple of swipes of your finger, you can shoot them an email or give them a call. You can even file a Freedom of Information request then and there.

"That kind of thing means that you don't have to travel to Albany, don't have to take a day off work anymore to actually have a voice in government," said Senate Chief Information Officer Andrew Hoppin.

Hoppin is the man behind the first legislative iPhone app in the country, and is the first CIO the New York Senate has ever had. Since January of last year he and his team have been using technology to tackle three main things: increasing transparency, efficiency and participation.

"This is the citizens information, right? We pay for it with our tax dollars. And so our bottom line is that none of that information should be sequestered or private or secret or even difficult to find," said Hoppin.

So far it's meant revamping the senate website and making it easier to look up the status of a bill or find out how much administrators like Hoppin are paid.

But what tech geeks are most excited about is the open source platform that it's built on.

Mark Headd is a fan. He's a developer at a Delaware-based software firm by day, and a "civic coder" by night.

"In a way what they've started to do is to turn the New York State Senate into an operating system," said Headd. "You can write software that will run on top of the New York Senate."

Using open source legislative data, Headd was able to do something he'd been thinking about for a long time: make an application that would let anyone get the status of a bill by simply sending a text message.

Basically, open source software is software that can be tweaked and modified. It's a way for developers like Headd to build new tools.

"That's the real power of open source," said Headd. "You're leveraging huge communities of developers that have very unique and specialized skills."

Skills that civic-minded open source developers deploy free of charge.

But beyond cost savings, it's an important step, according to Blair Horner.

Horner's a government watchdog at the New York Public Interest Research Group -- or NYPIRG.

"Albany's setup, its design, its secretive nature is to benefit those people that have money," said Horner. "The only way you're going to change it is by opening the doors to the public. And technology provides the doorway."

Technology that makes NYPIRG's work easier. When Senate CIO Hoppin made transcripts of floor debates available online, Horner says his organization was able to analyze how often individual senators spoke. They found one senator who didn't utter a full sentence in the first four months of the session. That type of analysis used to be nearly impossible to do.

Lisa Bang-Jensen of the right-leaning Empire Center for New York State Policy also thinks the work of the Senate CIO should be applauded. But she says critical information - like details on the budget - is missing from the Senate site. And then there's the Senate itself.

"The Senate talks a good game on transparency," said Bang-Jensen. "But when it comes to the budget, the budget was negotiated behind closed doors. There are no conference committees. That is not transparency."

"Have we been able to make this the most effective legislative body in the country? I don't think so," said Hoppin. "I don't think technology every can. I think the job of technology is to not stand in the way and to invite more people into that conversation."

So far the reviews have been positive.

NYSenate.gov is often held up with WhiteHouse.gov as a model of good, so-called Gov 2.0 websites.
Hoppin hopes that other states take his open source code and run with it.