We were very pleased to see this great write-up in the blog of the New York State Senate Office of the CIO, “Dialing in to the NYSenate OpenLeg API“, that outlines the great work that independent developer Mark Headd has done.
As the article notes, Mark has used our IMified platform to let people find out the status of legislation before the NY State Senate using:
- Instant Messaging Client (Jabber): opensenate@bot.im
- Twitter Client: Send a tweet formatted as a @reply to @opensenate
- Short Message Service (SMS): Send a text message to (315) 308-1943
- Regular Telephone: Call (646) 736-2439 (see note below)
Through whichever channel people want to use, they can now query the NY State Senate legislation database and find out the status of various bills. As the NY State Senate blog post author, Nathan Freitas, stated:
These services fit very well with the Office of the CIO’s vision for a fully mobile-accessible legislative body, where everyone from elected officials to their consituents can fluidly connect with eachother around issues that matter to them no matter where they are. Access of information via mobile phones also signficantly leverages the playing field when it comes to cost… a $99 iPhone is a pretty fantastic computing device.
Mark went into more details on his own blog in a post, “Leveraging the Government 2.0 Platform“, specifically noting that the exposure of an open API by the NY State Senate was the exciting part to him:
When governments make their data available in public formats, and expose APIs for querying such data, they are throwing the door open to outside developers to build useful things. That’s significant, and the NY Senate should get some major props for being among the first (if not the first) legislative body in the country to provide an API for their legislative information.
When governments make data available through an API, they are telling developers: “Use any platform or programming language you want to access our data.” The basic requirements for invoking an API like the NY Senate’s (or the District of Columbia’s 311 API) is the ability to communicate via HTTP and to parse XML, or JSON. Since pretty much every modern programming language and development platform can do these things, it creates opportunities for developers of all stripes.
But if APIs are platform and language agnostic, they are also modality agnostic – if the data exposed through an API is compact enough, there are lots of different ways to present this data to an end user.
Mark also notes that his application actually uses two of Voxeo’s platforms. The IM, SMS and Twitter interfaces come through IMified and the voice comes through our hosted Prophecy platform (via our Evolution developer portal). As we announced recently, SMS and IM integration are now available directly to Evolution users and now creating multi-modal / multichannel applications just got that much easier!
Kudos to the NY State Senate Office of the CIO for providing their open API and to Mark Headd for the great work he did making that API accessible to people through voice, IM, SMS and Twitter.
Great to see!
Are you a developer working with voice or communications applications in the San Francisco Bay area? Or will you be in SF next week 
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