Sneak Peek at the NYS Senate Site

I’d like you to take a moment and check out the Assembly’s website. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

The Assembly website is the internet version of Sheldon Silver. Bland, boring, institutional, entrenched, uninviting, something you want to get the hell away from asap.

The State Senate has a new team of people working on its site now that the Dems have taken control of it, and there’s a new way of thinking going on.

Tomorrow at around 11:15 am, go over to the new NYS Senate site and sign up.

The first thing you might notice is that none of it is copyrighted. The whole thing will be operated under a Creative Commons license set to “zero” – it’s all public domain. After all, you pay for the site and its content.

Naturally, the State Senate will be Tweeting, and if you go check out the list of state Senators, it will link to any available Twitter or Facebook profile.

Well, except maybe for George Maziarz…

Proposed legislation is easy to access, and even easier to comment on. Some more complicated bills will be published in plain language so that people who actually work for a living can keep track of what’s going on.

How about commenting on bills as part of a public markup process?

An open data initiative is also there, but it’s in .pdf format, which is limited in terms of numbers-crunching. Hopefully in the future the data will be in a more malleable format.

This site is unprecedented for New York’s legislature, which is known for being a lot of things – transparent and accessible not being among them. The team of people who have been putting this together are taking suggestions from the public because they want the site to be a model for how governments share information with stakeholders.

It provides individual senators with a better ability to not just announce crap to their constituents, but to genuinely interact with them through social media and blogs.

The website represents a step forward for good government in a state that sorely needs it. I hope that this translates into more fundamental changes to the procedures employed in the Senate itself. All in all, a positive thing for us taxpayers.