When you see it in action, a strong commitment to Open Government and genuine public access to information raises only one question, "what are all other governing bodies so afraid of?"

Under the direction of new Senate Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Hoppin, the Senate has been undertaking a number of exciting new initiatives that will open up the Senate to the public, clean up the mess of costly outside vendors controlling content, and provide an unprecedented level of ease for the public to access legislative information. via the albany project:: Some More NYSenate.gov Deets.nysenate.gov will host more than 90 unique websites serving all 62 members of the Senate and many committees, utilizing new technology for crowd sourcing, blogging, and linking into social networking sites.

"The previous Senate website was difficult to navigate and didn't provide much to visitors. By comparison, this site was built solely around encouraging public participation in the legislative process. We want to hear what New Yorkers think," added Smith.

The new website, built entirely on open-source software, helps Senators and Committees to more easily share their work with New Yorkers through blogging, the posting of news article, photos, videos, event calendars and public schedules.

The website also makes this information easy to access by providing powerful content search capabilities, RSS feeds, email and SMS text message news signups for all Senators and Committees, and one-click republishing of content from the Senate website to a range of social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The new website also provides a new platform for public participation in government, featuring public commenting on Senate blog posts, "public markup" on proposed legislation, and "crowdsourcing" of citizen ideas about critical pending legislative issues.

The Open Data section of the website is dedicated specifically to publishing data about the work of the Senate in a form that citizens and good government groups can use to exercise oversight over the Senate and other government entities of New York State.

Open data is the real key to this revolutionary appraoch. One of the most rgatifying sights is to see that Open data is a global navigation link, right up there beside the About, Home and Contact links. From the NYSenate.gov website.

As part of the New York Senate's commitment to transparency and openness to the public, we are working to release government data in a way that is both easy to access and easy to use.

The Plain Language Initiative

Data in this section has been analyzed and put into the "plain language" people speak everyday. By having actual people interpret the laws and data of the Senate and put it next to the original language, we hope to make government information more accessible to everyone.

The PLI is still in development but feel free to have a look at our work-in-progress prototype to open up the MTA Budget.

Easy Use

Aside from making complicated data easy to understand, the new Open Data project will take government data out of PDFs and other formats that are difficult to analyze with database and spreadsheet software. By putting information into easy to download, easy to manipulate files, the Senate will empower independent people and organizations to do their own research and analysis.

One of my definitions of web 2.0, when I'm forced to give one, is that it means putting your data on the edge of your domain where others can access it and use it in their own tools, on their own sites. Its not just about what you can do, its about how much you enable others.

The real power of 2.0 is that it only takes one person or organisation to process the data in a new way and then it becomes available to everyone in that new form. NY State appears to be taking the right steps to make public information truly public. It woudl certainly make NGO work easier if we could all have access to the raw data, how is your government connection doing at providing Open Data?

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