A few months ago, Andrew Hoppin was advising President Obama's NASA transition team and contemplating his next move. He was settling back into New York after leaving the NASA Ames Research Center near Sunnyvale, Calif., where he co-founded and managed the NASA CoLab-a program that aimed to bring efficiency and transparency to the creaky government agency through new technologies. He encouraged astronauts to Twitter from space.
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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.
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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."
An embrace of new technology and new communications tools should be a very welcome development for those of us who have advocated for more access to usable information about how the state is governed. It's so refreshing to see that the Senate appears to be genuinely interested in making data that by all rights the property of the citizens of New York available in a useful manner. It is also quite a breath of fresh air to see the New York State Senate(!) adopting robust two way communications across a number of platforms.
This is stuff that other states have been doing for years and we have a lot of catching up to do. But, the years of neglect do have a silver lining. This new team is essentially starting from scratch in many of these endeavors. They have the opportunity to build an entirely new series of tools and processes without being much burdened by bad decisions or purchases or policies from a decade ago. That's a luxury early adopter states don't really have.
What will Hoppin's team do with this opportunity to profoundly re-engineer the Senate's relationship with information as well as with those the Senators were elected to serve? I guess we'll see. That said, I'm very, very encouraged so far.
