The site allows users to search for bills by sponsor, committee, recent actions, and recent votes. You can also search by keyword, like, say, "bicycle" and find relevant bills and data available in four different formats.

Most of this information was already available online, chief information officer Andrew Hoppin told the Observer. But it was dispersed over several different sites, didn't have permanent links and was also "un-Google-able." Bills also weren't available in so many formats, in near real-time. The public can now find each bill through the portal and comment on it.

"We knew from the beginning that we wanted to get data directly into the Senate's hands," Mr. Hoppin told the Observer. But especially the people's fingertips. "We didn't just want to point people at it somewhere on the Web, but also make it available in a well-structured form for people to use and reuse in different forms."

The site will mostly be useful for Senators, developers and media types looking to display specific data in charts during campaigns or check out a bill status. But Mr. Hoppin said he hopes more everyday citizens will be interested in the data as well.

"We wanted to sort of show that an important part of transparency is not just about the data literally being available or even being accessible," he said. "It has to be easy to find so people can make use of it and share it and also give feedback."

Mr. Hoppin and his team will update the site by the end of the month with more information that "has never been seen before on the Internet," according to Mr. Hoppin, thanks to the rules reforms passed by the Senate in June. The data collected, which was previously only available by enacting the Freedom of Information Act, will include detailed transcripts of sessions, committee votes and committee attendance.

As the Observer reported in June, Ben Kallos, former chief of staff to Assemblyman Jonathan Bing who was working on Mark Green's campaign, launched NewYork.OpenLegislation.org, which allowed users see how each lawmaker voted on a particular piece of legislation and see whether lawmakers attended their committee meetings. Mr. Kallos and a few of his colleagues paid for the site out of his own pocket.

The state's moves to make this kind of data more available to the public are ahead of City Hall, where Gale Brewer, chair of the Council's Technology in Government Committee, is leading the open legislation charge.

"We can't afford in government to not innovate," he told the crowd. "We have an extreme demand to govern in the best way possible, from the standpoint of, particularly, transparency, accountability, participation—the ability to participate in government—and efficiency, obviously. And in order to figure out how to do that optimally, we really need help. And we need to help each other across all the different sort of lines of demarcation that traditionally segregate our work into different organizations or particular roles."

Mr. Hoppin was at Capitol Camp, an all-day “unconference” hosted and organized by the NYS office of the chief information officer and his own team. Since he was hired in late January by Malcolm Smith, then the Senate majority leader, and Senate secretary Angelo Aponte, Mr. Hoppin and his young tech-whiz recruits have been working on their Obama campaign-inspired revamp of the Senate's Web site and services in order to, as Mr. Hoppin told The Observer in March, bring back-door conversations and government data and empower constituents.

On Monday, June 7, just three days after Capitol Camp, the Senate would flip out of control with Republicans briefly gaining a 32-30 edge in the chamber—ousting tech patron Mr. Smith from his majority role.

“Came to Albany with one shirt Sunday evening; still wearing it,” Mr. Hoppin wrote on his Twitter feed on June 10. “[A]lso just ate first food of the day, but that part isn't unusual since Feb.”

As Democrats and Republicans continue to wrestle for control in Albany, and as the threat of a power change looms, Mr. Hoppin and his team have been continuing to pump up the Web site they launched in May, nysenate.gov, including blog posts from senators and other statements about the recent upheaval. They’ve also made modifications that allow constituents to give direct feedback to Senators on proposed bills, hearings and issues in "crowdsourcing portals" for property taxes, ethics reform and campaign finance.

“As best we can, we've been keeping our heads down and doing our work,” Mr. Hoppin told The Observer in an interview last week.

In fact, Mr. Hoppin and his crew have been working hard to ensure that no matter what happens—say, if the Republicans secure control of the Senate and replace them—they’ll have left their mark not just on Albany, but on government in general.

The team has been focusing on a project at the heart of their initiative called open.nysenate.gov, a data portal that makes information like bill text, budget plans and Senators' expenditure and funding reports more accessible to the public. They also launched a beta version of their Open Legislation Service, a public database of legislation searchable by bill number, sponsor, committee or keyword. Additionally, they’re creating color-coded tagging systems within documents for easy skimming; translating legal and political jargon into more readable text for their Plain Language Initiative; designing RSS feeds and alert systems for issues; and crafting both a new email blast program and revamped intranet communication system.

“The technology we have built to give the public direct access to legislative data is the core infrastructure for transparency,” he wrote in an email. “Once the data is available, then it can be analyzed, combined with other data, and republished in a manner that we believe will help more people become more informed and engage more actively in the legislative process.”

For example, using the CIO team's Web tools and data, an application developer named Mark Headd recently built an instant messaging service that allows constituents to chat directly with senators.

“With this infrastructure built and supplying a limited set of legislative data today, opening up more legislative and other data becomes merely a policy decision rather than a technological hurdle,” Mr. Hoppin said. “We've accomplished the heavy lifting behind the scenes.”

Earlier this month, the team also secured a Creative Commons license, which was signed off on by Secretary Mr. Aponte and officially adopted into policy. “Everything posted on nysenate.gov is available for anyone to take and use,” Mr. Hoppin explained, adding that pictures or text at nysenate.gov (not videos, yet) can be repurposed on other Web sites—as long as it's not used for political funding.

Mr. Hoppin said he hopes that once senators settle their disputes Albany, the technological and transparency work will continue—regardless of who controls the majority.

"Even if we got, worst case, if we get completely shut down, we would've moved the needle in a way that is meaningful—but that's obviously not what we want," Mr. Hoppin told The Observer. "We're working hard to establish a precedent for the Senate and continue to be built upon either by us or by other folks."

And “other folks” might in fact make a power grab for Web services. L&P Media is a Troy, New York–based company that has earned almost half a million dollars over the last seven years developing Web sites for Republican senators and, as The Observer reported in February, was also under contract to blast out emails attacking Senate Democrats. According to L&P Media president John Daniels, the company is no longer under contract with the New York State Senate.

"If they decide to swing it back, they could always renew our contract, but I guess it depends on what day of the week it is," he quipped to The Observer, noting the Senate’s daily fluctuations.

Mr. Hoppin said he and his team have been working on both sides of the aisle—Republicans and Democrats—through the upgrades. "We've been working in a trans-partisan way with technology in the Senate, so we've got a lot of advocates. … That significantly increases the chance, I would say, that the nature of our work would be continued to some degree regardless of who is here to do it,” he said.

"I don't think we're perceived as being as much of a threat," he added.

Yet some Senators aren't happy with nysenate.gov. "They talked a better game than they implemented with this," said Kemp Hannon, a Republican Senator who called in to The Observer from his Garden City office. “If you looked at it two weeks ago, it was simply Malcolm Smith–oriented. It subsumed senators. That was the problem, and that's why I have a Web site of my own.”

“I don't know what is going to happen [but] I'd like a process where exactly what went wrong with this won't go wrong again,” he said. “That has been a continued problem with New York.”

When asked if he had approached the CIO team about his problems with the site, Senator Hannon said, “The Malcolm Smith regime has been totally immune to any suggestions.”

In response to Mr. Hannon’s comments, Mr. Hoppin said: “We field requests for improvements all the time from senators on both majority and minority offices. We have an issue-tracking system that is being worked through pretty rapidly, so we really welcome input and feedback.” He is looking forward to the summer, when senators might have more time to give recommendations to improve the site and other technological services.

Mr. Hoppin said that if a new regime that wasn't dedicated to transparency, efficiency and participation took control of the majority office, he would leave his post. “But my biggest concerns are my team,” Mr. Hoppin said, “and the big opportunities we had to make this sort of like ‘worst to first’ in terms of a legislative body.”

greagan@observer.com

Originally launched in 2007, Mahalo's Web directory combines search algorithms and content found by real-life editors to present results pages that include text listings, photos and video. It looks a bit like About.com. "We put Yahoo!, Flickr and Wikipedia in one page," Mr. Calacanis told The Observer in an earlier interview. "People understand [the subject] better. You can send that page to mom, and she'll get it."

But now Mr. Calacanis will integrate a Wikipedia-like practice, and allow user editing—for pay.

Mahalo users can sign up and "claim" pages on the site based on their expertise. If they are, say, obsessed with Gossip Girl, they could "claim" Mahalo's Gossip Girl page and be curate its content—updating it when a new character arrives or a scandalous news article is written about one of its stars. As a reward for their Chuck Bass knowledge, that user gets half the advertising revenue generated from Google ads on his or her page. Mr. Calacanis said users get a number of pages based on their "belt" level (white belts, or beginners, get two pages, tops), but they can claim more pages the more they use the site, answer questions, and get kudos from other users. If they're lazy about maintaining their topic page, Mahalo can yank their rights to the page so another user can claim it. (Later, users might be able to start selling pages to each other, Mr. Calacanis told CNET News).

Launched in 2007, tech critics have been skeptical of Mr. Calacanis' Mahalo—some even claiming, with this new version, that he's hiring user editors because the venture is ailing. But he told The Observer he sees potential now that companies like Microsoft (which recently released Bing) are utilizing "human-powered" search engine results.

Ms. Calacanis, one of New York's biggest tech egos, operates Mahalo from the West Coast but told The Observer he misses New York "terribly" and plans a return. He said on stage at the Meetup that after September 11, he couldn't go downtown without crying. (He told The Observer that the aftermath of the attacks is one of the reasons why he left.) But, if Mr. Calacanis does return, he'll come back to a new tech scene, revived with young, more creative companies than when he left, he admitted.

Some of them include those that presented at last night's Meetup, like Aviary, which actually offers artists online photo, video and media tools for free. Vice President Michael Galpert whizzed through some new features including sound integration and editing. Their Web-based suite of tools won the CNet Editor's Award for Technical Achievement in the 2009 Webware100 competition. Don't have Photoshop? Check out their "Phoenix" photo editor, and see why they got the prize.

Bre Prettis gave a 5-minute runthrough of his company, Makerbot, which makes an an "open source robot" that helps people make their own robots that actually make things. Their prototype: The CupCake CNC, a bot about the size of a small TV that will perfectly frost cupcakes. Buy their OpenSourced 3D printer kit for $750 and build an army of bots. We're waiting for a Shake Shack burger builder.

On that Shake Shack bit, you can find that burger joint, along with others, using UpNext NYC, a kind of Google Earth iPhone application of the city that includes 3-D imagery and easy restaurant and service searches (there's a subway map too!). Users can 'like' and 'dislike' certain spots in the city and see other reviews from in the UpNext community. Another mobile service presented last night was, Centrl. Its a location-based application that allows its users to search for discounts, deals and landmarks within walking distance, and integrates social networks like Facebook and Twitter so users can interact with their friends.

Andrew Hoppin, New York State Senate chief of information officer, and C.I.O. team member Noel Hidalgo talked about "open government" initiatives for recently launched Web site NYSenate.gov. Chief executive Max Haot also presented a "pro" version of Livestream, an online live Webcasting service previously named Mogolus that received $10 million in funding from the Gannett Co. last July. They're broadcasting that I Want Media "Future of Media Panel 2009" panel going on right about now...

Now, excuse us while we watch Gawker's Nick Denton, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, the Wall Street Journal's deputy managing editor Alan Murray and other media wonks bloviate about the "future" of the choking-to-death newspaper business. Shhh, watching right now.

"We made a commitment when we took over the majority that we were going to put the Senate into the hands of people," he said. "We don't think the 62 senators in the state of New York are just the smart people. We know there are smart people all around the state and all around this country so by using our Twitters, by using our Facebook, by using your interactive communication, we will move New York into the 21st century."

"We believe that we're going to have the best communication device through the social networks than any state legislature in the country," he said.

The Observer's Politicker reporter Jimmy Vielkind has the initial report.

The Senate's first chief of information officer, Andrew Hoppin, a former NASA "guru," as Mr. Smith described him, and his team of tech whizzes have been working on the Web site since January. They have also been training senators and their staff members on blogging, Twittering and how to gather feedback from the site for their decision-making processes, according to Mr. Hoppin. Nine Senators are Twittering so far, including Mr. Smith.

For the first time, the New York Senate site allows users to browse the site by issue, like transportation or education, and view articles, bills, upcoming hearings, and videos on the subject.

In the NYSenate Markup section, there are eight bills yet to make it on the floor of the Senate. Users can make comments on the bill below the text, which will be discussed in an upcoming public hearing. The site also uses crowd-sourcing tools for propertytaxideas.nysenate.gov, where users can view and vote, up or down, on ideas and submit their own.

The Plain Language M.T.A. Budget, another feature created by Mr. Hoppin's team, translates data and legal jargon from M.T.A. budget documents into readable text, tables and charts to help commuters understand why the M.T.A. board proposed bridge tolls, fare hikes and service cuts.

Last night, the Senate debated the latest M.T.A. budget bill and the discussions were broadcast live on Mogulus, a live broadcasting platform on the Web that is based in New York and which received $10 million in venture capital funding from Gannett Company Inc. last July. Several senators' testimonies and explanations for their votes are now available on the Senate site for review.

After the press conference, Mr. Hoppin told the Observer that his staff is working with Google and their applications to replace antiquated billing and communication services. They are also replacing a news circulation system (that required staffers to literally paste news articles onto paper) and is signing on with Daylife, an online news platform, to distribute articles and share what senators are reading. He also told The Observer that the team is working on exporting raw data reports that the senators use to make their decisions available to the public, along with reportage on senator attendance and voting records, which are currently unavailable on the site.

His team launched a Facebook page, Twitter account and Tumblr blog to announce new projects from the chief of information office

Mr. Hoppin also announced Capital Camp, an "unconference" with politicians and citizens, to be held on June 5 in Albany to share their process and hear ideas on how to continue to reform government through technology.

"Our new Web site uses technology that brings New Yorkers together," said Mr. Smith in a video posted on the site, and on the Senate's official YouTube channel. "We may not agree on everything. But your ideas need to be heard. You need to know how proposed laws affect your life, what matters to you. Get you know your Senator, and learn how you can be a greater part of the great state of New York. Contact us. We are listening."

"We made a commitment when we took over the majority that we were going to put the Senate into the 21^st Century," Majority Leader Malcolm Smith said at the event, which was linked--with some hiccups--to a gathering in Albany, which I attended. "We believe that we are going to have the best communication though all our social networks of any state legislature in the country."

The sites were developed in-house, spokesman Travis Proulx said, under the direction of Andrew Hoppin and Brian Keeler. One of the new features, for example, allows people to comment on pending legislation.

No immediate word on how much this cost, which is an issue some Republicans have raised. Proulx said it is less than a previous  contract with L&P Media, an outside firm that also did campaign work for Republicans.

But once all these New York government officials start making their own YouTube channels and Twitter pages, and documents get out of PDFs and into more reader-friendly formats, what could that mean for news sites? Can they leverage that information to their advantage?

Consider Apture. The New York Times' Web site recently enabled the new feature on a few of their blogs. In late March, links with tiny icons debuted on Dot Earth, Economix and Diner’s Journal blogs and became "super links." When users click on them, a little window pops up allowing them to instantly view related photos, YouTube videos, documents, maps, PDF files—whatever was relevant to the link without ever actually navigating away from the page or opening up a new tab or browser window. Check out this Diner's Journal post, in which writer Indrani Sen created a swine-flu-inspired "Support Pork Week" series by eating the other white meat at El Puente in Wiliamsburg. A little icon next to "El Puente" indicated that it was a "super link" and opens a window of UrbanSpoon.com reviews on of the restaurant.

AdaptiveBlue, a New York–based company, has a similar feature called SmartLinks, which lays out a slew of related materials in their little pop-ups, from Flickr photos to Wikipedia articles.

The "super link" feature is usually associated with sneaky pop-up advertising in blogs and commerce sites (ick!). But it actually makes browsing links within articles a bit easier and makes readers spend more time on the original site, instead of clicking on a bunch of links within an article and getting lost down the Internet rabbit hole while surfing the Web. News sites like NYTimes.com can benefit from keeping readers engaged with their pages for advertising reasons too—it bumps their "engagement" stats.

Apture is a Silicon Valley–based company founded by three Stanford graduates and incubated from Stanford Knight Fellows, a group of distinguished journalists from all over the world, who had ideas on how to improve online news. Steve Taylor, a former executive vice president of The Boston Globe, is just one angel investor that contributed to the $4.1 million the company announced that they received to finance the venture in March.

Apture can be installed as a plug-in on blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress. But they've also made some big-time deals with publishers, including Washingtonpost.com and BBCNews.com. On April 29, Apture announced a new partnership with Reuters.com (see this article on the Ashton Kutcher–Britney Spears–CNN Twitter race as an example).

Last night, on March 5, at the New York Tech Meetup, in an auditorium at New World Stages on West 50th Street, Tristan Harris, Apture's co-founder and chief executive, explained how the feature can change open government practice with their partnership with washingtonpost.com.

The feature allows readers to instantly review Congressional bills and a politicians' financial disclosures and voting records in those little pop-up windows, not to mention the ability to send an email from the washingtonpost.com site to air their views. Click on the little White House icon next to Senator Chuck Schumer's name in this recent article on Arlen Specter's party switch, for example.

Mr. Harris also demonstrated how Apture links in the Washington Post Congress browser are enhanced with videos from that Congressperson’s official YouTube Channel. Readers can watch a senator's speech alongside their official Twitter stream and voting history "to see if there's anything contradictory to what she's saying," Mr. Harris explained to the crowd. All that information, usually difficult to find within government walls, is just one click from a senator's name on washingtonpost.com, but Mr. Harris explains how any blogger can use this kind of feature on their own site in this video.

Have at it, Government 2.0!

Anderson's hire, along with those of Brian Keeler as director of communications and Andrew Hoppin as chief information officer, is part of the larger effort to bring the idea of Government 2.0 to New York. It's all of a piece with the agenda being pushed by the politically connected open-source-technology-and-transparency proselytizers Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry.

"Brian and I have known each other for years, we both know Micah and Andrew Hoppin," Anderson told me. "We do travel in the same circles. And one of the things that really appealed to me about coming to work for the State Senate is being able to implement some of the stuff we've been talking about for years."

Anderson told me he'll earn $70,000 a year in the new post.

But after more than two years at the agency, he was itching to get more involved in the “government 2.0” initiatives that Mr. Obama and his new-media team were working on in Washington.

So in January, he approached his friend, Andrew Rasiej, a fixture in political tech circles. It was perfect timing; since early January, Mr. Rasiej and Micah Sifry, co-founders of Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident.com, had been advising the New York Senate majority leader, Malcolm Smith, on using technology to make Albany more open, transparent and efficient—the same kind of work Mr. Hoppin had been doing at NASA. Mr. Rasiej encouraged Mr. Hoppin to consider applying his talents to New York State.

“I told him, Obama’s people will be looking over your shoulder because they won’t be able to move fast enough,” Mr. Rasiej told The Observer. In the Senate, Mr. Rasiej explained, Mr. Hoppin had the opportunity to “move the ball farther” and set an example for upgrading government for every state in the nation.

“They convinced me that they were really serious about this,” said Mr. Hoppin, 37, who is mild-mannered, of medium height and wears gray suits with blue shirts to match his eyes. He often keeps his top button unbuttoned. “They would take Albany, which doesn’t have the best reputation for being the most efficient place, and do it right with transparency and technology.” Mr. Smith, along with Senate secretary Angelo Aponte, appointed Mr. Hoppin to be the first ever chief information officer for the New York State Senate.

ON A RECENT bright March morning, Mr. Hoppin was on the 19th floor of 250 Broadway, in a conference room in the Senate majority leader’s office, conducting a meeting with the team he had been quietly building since he was hired on Jan. 29. Their mission? To upgrade the New York State Senate and bring it into the 21st century with technology. For some members of the CIO team, it was their first full week on the job.

“Do you have any Facebook updates?” asked Jim Bell, the director of Senate technology services. He was videoconferencing in from Mr. Hoppin’s Albany office, along with Dean Hill, a veteran technology policy analyst. Sitting at a long wooden table, their laptops at attention, were Krista Brenner, a former Assembly chief of staff and State Senate campaign manager; Noel Hidalgo, a digital communications and technology organizer for both John Kerry’s presidential campaign and the New York Senate’s minority leader’s office; and Ben Yee, who ran President Obama’s New York State new-media team during his campaign. Mr. Yee answered Mr. Bell: “Facebook just restructured the way they operate, again,” he said, so he had to make changes to the “Facebook strategy document”—a guide that will be posted on the Senate’s new Web site (also in the works) to explain the social networking site and how senators might find it useful.

Mr. Yee is also designing a “Twitter strategy document” that will encourage Senators and their staff to sign up for the microblogging service. Just that morning, Mr. Hoppin had been flashing his new Senate business card, the first ever to boast a Twitter address: @ahoppin.

“It’s a cultural stake in the ground,” Mr. Hoppin explained to The Observer, “saying, you know, not only is [Twitter] not a bad idea, it’s a good idea to communicate openly about what you’re doing—it’s relevant for government transparency, it’s relevant for government efficiency, it’s relevant to get people aware of what you’re doing so they can participate in what you’re doing.”

To be sure, if Mr. Hoppin and his team have a mantra, it’s “efficiency, transparency and participation.” In just a few weeks, they announced that senators could (finally) access their email on the Web (efficiency). They launched a Facebook page, Twitter account and Tumblr blog to announce new projects from the chief of information office (transparency). And they helped create, literally overnight, two Web sites to solicit suggestions from constituents on the M.T.A.’s budget shortfall (NYMTAIdeas.org) and opinions on the state’s budget deficit (NYBudgetIdeas.org), as well as a prototype Web site for the Plain Language Initiative, which translates extracts data and legal jargon from M.T.A. budget documents into readable text, tables and charts to help commuters understand why the M.T.A. board is proposing bridge tolls, fare hikes and service cuts (participation).

And that’s only the beginning. Within the next month, the team will launch a new Web site designed with Drupal, an open-source software program, (which powers Observer.com) that will make blogging available to senators and include applications for more public participation. Constituents will be able to post views on new bills and initiatives, as well as review and “vote” up and down on the ideas of others. The CIO team is organizing training sessions for senators and their staff on social networking platforms and how to pay attention to online feedback. Last week, they hired mobile specialist Nathan Freitas to create new phone applications that will allow citizens to get government news on the go. This week, they hired a Drupal whiz, Craig Leinoff, who worked as technical officer and contributor for Jewcy Magazine.

The group plans on creating a wiki—an editable, community-created online document—that will welcome ideas and suggestions from New Yorkers and other state government staffers on their road map to upgrading Albany.

“Technology has to be a strategic asset of every office, rather than something that is off in a corner,” Mr. Hoppin told The Observer. “There’s a lot of room for government to use technology for better transparency, better efficiency, better participation, but also empowering legislators to do a better job—but it requires putting technology at the center.”

Senator Smith and Mr. Aponte have put their faith in Mr. Hoppin to get the job done. “How do you undo decades of complacency in a couple of weeks?” asked Mr. Smith’s press secretary, Austin Shafran. “We have complete confidence in him. He’s opening up our eyes to whole new levels.”

“Malcolm Smith and his staff’s commitment to reorganizing Albany on a 21st-century platform, with a commitment to transparency for constituents, is the most significant political event in the past 30 years and has the potential to be not thought of as evolutionary but revolutionary,” said Mr. Rasiej, who is also technology advisor to online government watchdog initiative Sunlight Foundation. Mr. Hoppin and his team “have the right DNA to change Albany.”

MR. HOPPIN a Brookline, Mass., native, studied planetary sciences and environmental science, policy and management at Brown University and Berkeley. He was a tech entrepreneur in New York before he founded a local group in the draft–Wesley Clark movement, New York for Clark, in 2003. He joined Mr. Clark’s presidential campaign in Little Rock, Ark., and helped manage the campaign’s voter data and the nation’s first open-source campaign software volunteer program—called Clark Tech Corps. After Mr. Clark withdrew from the race, Mr. Hoppin joined the new-media masterminds behind Howard Dean’s campaign to help manage CivicSpace Labs, which developed open-source software to aid political and charity communities for online organizing and advocacy. The group’s work became “the godfather model for organizations like Blue State Digital,” the company that became famous for their new-media work with President Obama, Mr. Rasiej said.

So being right in “the belly of the beast” in Albany, as Mr. Rasiej put it, is new for Mr. Hoppin. He spends about two or three days a week in Albany, and the rest of the time with his team in Mr. Smith’s New York City office.

“These new technologies will help senators be able to post ideas and issues that they want more minds on. That shouldn’t be hard, that shouldn’t be a huge process or a discreet process, once you create it right the first time,” Mr. Hoppin said. “Conversations in the corner of the room are always going to happen. But things can be moved through technology and communication mechanisms so there are more opportunities to see what we’d like to see in terms of transparency and efficiency and accountability, improvements in process.”

Mr. Hoppin said that once antiquated software is replaced and new Web-based applications and training are in place, senators and their staffers will have more time and money to work among, and for, their constituents.

Mr. Rasiej added that by releasing raw data—stats, ideas, process paths and money trails—the government allows technologists, organizations and citizens to create new ways to present information that might be more useful than the senate's official format. “Making a document available to the public in as real time as possible is the only way that the government fulfills their mandate for an openness and transparency and serve their constituents,” he said. These changes will not only refashion Albany’s image as corrupt and outdated, but also empower people, Mr. Rasiej said.

“People underestimate the power of data,” he added. “It’s like letting the genie out of the bottle.”

“For me, as a human being, that’s the most empowering experience I can have—is having the opportunity to really contribute to somebody or something that is really important to me,” Mr. Hoppin added. “If we all had that opportunity in our town, our state or from above, we’d all be enriched by that. We’d become more educated about our government; we’d become more empowered to exercise oversight into our government and contribute to our communities.”

greagan@observer.com