Sneak Preview: New NY Senate Website
The new NY Senate website is just about ready to rock, and Phillip Anderson of Albany Project fame gave us the keys to take it for a test drive around the block. Some very good stuff in there. Don’t have time for a full, top-down review, but here’s some highlights I found. In some cases, you can see where bloggers’ pain trying to pry information from the Senate’s cold, dead hands in the past few years, has resulted in some solid enhancements to the site.
Legislation Markup
You can now look at bills that are in the “markup” phase, that clearly show the text of the bill and what’s being added and/or removed. What’s more, you can add your own feedback in the comments for each one.
Open Data
Another effort underway is to translate governmental stuff into “Plain Language”, to make it easier for people without a legal or an accounting degree to understand what’s going on under the hood.
Here’s an example of something they translated into “Plain Language”: the MTA budget. Nice to see the different ways the numbers are sliced, diced, and reported. Lots of links and ways to “drill down” into the data. The page makes you want to keep clicking, like a good web page should.
Open Data Reports
Some of these look like they were available previously, but they were “new to me”. Looks like some good stuff in here as well.
Searchable Blogs
I don’t know if this was available before, but it’s really nice to be able to select a topic (in the example below, “Elections”) and get a list of all senators’ blog posts on that topic. I was hoping to see stuff on Clean Elections, but sadly, there’s only one post out there– dunno if old posts have not been tagged fully yet or what. I’m sure there’s a lot of legacy stuff that will take a while to reformat, tag, etc.
Overall, very promising. Looking forward to where we can go from here.
Related posts:
Great write up. My favorite bit is the difference between the old committee pages and the new committee pages. That’s a very telling detail.
Awesome Blog. You and TAP are phenomenal.
I’m not sure how helpful the Plain Language Initiative is, at least in the case of the MTA budget info that’s been provided so far. What was the point of taking PDF documents from the MTA web site into HTML? If anything, that just made them less readable, not more. How does a table of the net operating income/deficit of MTA’s sub-agencies help laypeople understand anything they didn’t know already? We need some written text to go along with the tables, to actually explain what’s going on.
Do you find those blogs all that helpful? Seems like some of these guys are just blogging as a PR thing — which means everything is so watered down. Just wondering.
John, I agree that there’s some watering down, but it’s helpful to get official text from one or more state electeds on where they stand on particular issues. I see this tool simplifying information gathering and whip-counting for issues.
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