When Open Government meets Fiction Government

by: simonstl

Thu Jul 02, 2009 at 14:30:07 PM EDT

I've been a big fan of the new New York State Senate web site. It's much more than "new and improved" - it actually offers a window into the operations of the Senate, inviting the audience not only to watch but to participate. It rightly made a splash at the Personal Democracy Forum, as a genuine step forward.

Unfortunately, it's had a bumpy few weeks. I'm very glad that they've opened the video feed so that we can see the Republican fake sessions as well as the Democratic fake sessions. (Admittedly that's only a few minutes a day.) It hasn't had the same kind of scrum as the rostrum, though it's been kind of surreal visiting it.

Today that surrealism kicked up a notch. The official Senate blog had been sticking to announcements and legal documents, even if most of these did seem to come from the Democratic leadership. The latest piece, though, is laughable:

On June 30, 2009, the State Senate convened a regular session at noon. Lisa Copeland, Deputy Journal Clerk of the Senate, identified 31 Democratic members as present in the Senate Chamber, along with Senator Frank Padavan (R-Queens). A quorum being obtained, the Senate proceeded to unanimously pass over 100 critical bills...

So what happens when an institutional site built on the premises of open government starts making claims - unsigned but "official" - that no one else in government is taking seriously, and which expose that institution to mockery?

I guess we'll find out!

Searchable Pork PDF

by: wycats

Mon Dec 04, 2006 at 08:23:04 AM EST

This means that the original images are still what you see when you look at the text, but you can also search, copy, and paste the text.

Some caveats:

• I did not attempt to clean up the word recognition at all. That means there is a large amount of incorrectly recognized words in the PDF. That said, searches for a particular Senator or organization should work fairly well.


• The file is 76MB in size. That is smaller than the 100+ MB that Bruno's office provided, but it is still quite large.

I will be processing and posting 2003-2004 in a similar format this week.

You can download the file at: http://www.thealbany...

Enjoy, and happy hunting.