OpenLeg now supports RSS, Email Alerts and PubSubHubbub

You might have noticed that the NY Senate OpenLeg system has a new view for browsing recent activity in the Senate and Assembly.

Of course we are all very busy people and probably don’t have the time every day to go check the site over and over again. What if instead you want these updates pushed out to you? Well, that’s what Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is for!

You can directly access and subscribe to the RSS feed for the latest bill actions through this link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/nysenateopenleg
(you can also access through our direct RSS link here:
http://open.nysenate.gov/openleg/feed )

By routing our feed through Google Feedburner, we can automatically enable two additional services.

First, if you prefer email to RSS, you can receive daily alerts of all bill activity in the last 24 hours. Click here to subscribe.

Second, Feedburner gives us support for Pingshot, which is Google’s implementation of the open-source protocol PubSubHubbub, something that sounds a bit wacky, but is becoming quite useful and interesting. Basically, it helps delivers alerts out to you more efficiently and quickly - always a good thing! Learn more about all the hubbub here.

Agile development, our SCRUM worksheet

for the past six months, we’ve been cranking out projects and suddenly realized that we needed to adopt a development mythology. since we had already adopted a SCRUMish format for our thrice weekly calls, we decided to delve deeper. this past Tuesday, the team traveled up to Albany for #CIOCamp where we SCRUM’d all of our projects.

since we are SCRUM nubes and we are adopting this mid-project/s, we’ve modified the SCRUM framework to develop this worksheet. if you have any improvements or suggestions, please add them to the comments section.

Title

Mission: (Declarative statement of the current project.)

CIO Priority: (1 - immediate priority, 2 - intermediate , 3 - developing)

Sponsor:

Customer/s:

Pigs

• Product Owner/s:
• SCRUM master:
• Team:

Chickens

• Team:
• Domain Experts:

Current Status: (in development or in discovery)

Sprint 1 Deadline - (date, ie Day Month Year)
Sprint 2 Deadline -
Sprint 3 Deadline -
Sprint 4 Deadline -
Sprint 5 Deadline -
Sprint 6 Deadline -

Product Backlog: (a listing of active steps to be taken.)

Notes:

live on the intranet, the New NYSenate newsclips service

While not publicly accessable, this is a brief summary of an awesome new intranet project we launched for all NY Senate Staffers.

Senate Newsclips service has been developed to replace a thirty year old offline newspaper clipping operation that was manually performed by senate staffers with scissors, glue and photocopiers. As dated as the old process seemed, within it had evolved a very advanced sense of what news was or wasn’t relevant to the NY Senate internal readership. The paper format had also become known and loved, like a ‘zine version of Google News with articles clipped, glued on to pages and then stamped with a single topic tag in the upper right hand corner - ECONOMY. HOUSING. CRIME. A tag system using a static taxonomy reminiscent of a dewey decimal like classification.

The challenge of the new, automated “Cylon Newsclips” (as it has been lovingly dubbed by it’s programer) is that it has to do both - bring the efficiency and cost savings of digital, while also standing up to the time-tested, well-loved offline newsclips. The service also must be available as an online, interactive web resource AND a downloadable, printable offline functional simile of what was previously mass photocopied and distributed across the Senate offices each day.

Using the Daylife service, a semantic news aggregator, the online Newsclips service is able to provide a rich summary of all the news articles from a targeted set of sources (say newspapers only in NY state) about a particular proper name or topic (“Malcolm A. Smith” or “MTA budget”). The service is presented as regularly refresh views for all 62 Senators, the other State executive offices, and a rich hierarchy of relevant topics. In addition a fully interactive keyword search is also offered, in the style of Lexus Nexus or Google News, but limited to news sources relevant to the NY Senate constiuencies. Any of the results can be downloaded and printed ina format that allows for quick scanning through headlines and then the full article or excerpt as available. Finally, all views are available to smartphones such as the iPhone, Blackberry or Google Android.

The first iteration of the new Newsclips service is now available on the Senate intranet. While two months of development can’t match thirty years of hands on learning, the service provides a timely, relevant, paper-free view of the latest news stories covering Senators and important topics for informing legislative work. We are looking forward to continuing improving the service as we get feedback from users over the next thirty years!

Tim Berners-Lee on "Putting Gov't Data online"

Footnote: Do’s and Don’ts

• Do pick URIs which are likely to be persistent
• Do put RDF metadata giving the license.
• Do use the RDF and SPARQL standards
• Make sure your human readable pages are accessible.
• Do NOT hide data files inside zip files unless they are also available directly.
• Do NOT put data up in proprietary formats.
• Do NOT wait until you have a complete schema or ontology to publish data.
• Do NOT seek to replace existing data systems.

Putting Government Data online