Voxeo Developers Corner

In a very cool demonstration of what you can do with the IMified platform, you can now use either IM or Twitter to find out the status of bills in the New York state senate.

Shortly after we announced the acquisition of IMified, independent developer Mark Headd let us know he was excited to give it a try for some of the “open government” projects he works on and documents on his VOX POPULI blog. On June 18th, he put up a great example: Building an IM Bot for the NY Senate OpenLeg API where you can simply send a Jabber/GoogleTalk IM message to:

opensenate@bot.im

with a New York Senate bill number in it and get back the status of that bill.

When we added Twitter support to IMified last week, Mark quickly added a Twitter ID to his service so that now you can simply send a Twitter “@” message to “@opensenate” with the same kind of request. You can see some of the interaction so far on the twitter.com/opensenate page.

Mark has nicely made available in his blog post the sample PHP code for his IMified bot. Mark has also been exchanging comments with Nathan Freitas from the New York Senate CIO team. It’s very cool to see that Mark was the very first external user of the NY Senate API. (Congrats, Mark!)

It’s all great work and we’re pleased to see what Mark has done with the platform.

Two other comments:

1. I was not personally aware of this NY Senate openness initiative, but from this article, “5 Open tenets of the new NYSenate.gov“, it sounds like some excellent work. (Note to NH state gov’t: can I get access like this, too, please?)

2. How great is it to have the NY Senate CIO office posting their open source code and API documentation on Github! Great to see.

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Technorati Tags: ny, nysenate, open, open government, government, voxeo, imified