Technologists Wanted: Join the New York State Senate Developers Network

Reposted from here: http://www.nysenate.gov/blogs/2010/oct/27/technologists-wanted-join-new-york-state-senate-developers-network

Over the past year and a half, the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the New York State Senate has worked to promote openness and transparency through the use of technology. Our goal is both to serve the needs of the Senate as an institution and also develop examples that other government bodies in New York and around the country can use, adapt and implement to further open up our government. Today, we’re taking the next step that effort by introducing the New York State Senate Developers Network.

The purpose of the network is to help any technologist interested in how technology is used in the Senate to easily find what they’re looking for, and to be able to interact directly with Senate technology staff.  We hope that such a network of developers will leverage the work that the Senate is already doing, both to serve their own needs and also to create more public benefit, at no additional cost to taxpayers.  We have created a Google Group Mailing List as well as an Internet Really Chat (IRC) at irc.freenode.net #NYSSDev to help and facilitate the discussion between our staff and all that are interested in talking with us.

In addition to the mailing lists and IRC room, we are also proud to announce the alpha release of our NYSenate.gov Application Programing Interface (API).  We hope that by providing a developer API to the treasure trove of information we have available on our website that technologists throughout New York State and the country will be able to create new and interesting tools for the public.

Along with our discussion groups and API, the New York State Senate Developers Network also provides a listing of RSS feeds available on our website as well as links to the Source Code that we have made available for our various projects, along with as our existing Open Legislation API.

Click Here to go to the New York State Senate Developers Network.

Video: My "Open Data for Developers" session from #CapitolCamp

Last Friday, the NY Senate CIO hosted the first ever Capitol Camp in Albany.

Along with Remy DeCausemaker, I led a session on “Open Data for Developers”, discussing the Why?/What?/How?’s of releasing government data in open formats with open tools. Remy demonstrated the scrubbers and scrapers that his organization Civx.us has developed.

Here’s the video…

You can view the complete session notes here along with notes and information on the rest of the event. There are also uncut videos of the rest of the sessions on the NY Senate Uncut YouTube Channel.