Andrew Hoppin

council.nyc.gov

Brewer.

The Bloomberg administration is generally perceived as progressive when it comes to giving citizens access to municipal data. Dozens of reports and statistics from city agencies are just a click away on nyc.gov, and New York's 311 information service was a significant logistical achievement, even if the technology behind it—the telephone!—now seems a bit archaic.

But there's a growing demand among transparency advocates for a more comprehensive and sophisticated level of data sharing.

The latest sign: a new bill making its rounds in the City Council that would create unprecedented open data standards for New York City government.

The bill, which is being spearheaded by Gale Brewer, who chairs the Council's Technology in Government Committee, is up for a public hearing on June 29. It would compile all of the city’s public data on a single Web site, like data.nyc.gov, as well as making the data available in a raw, machine-readable format so that programmers could develop useful online and mobile applications out of it.

Danny Kim

Hoppin.

Early this month, New York State Senate chief information officer Andrew Hoppin stood behind a podium in the airy, ornate State House, dressed in a casual gray suit, with a red name tag stuck to his jacket, and delivered a speech about how technology could help fix the state government’s reputation as a notoriously outdated and corrupt.

"We can't afford in government to not innovate," he told the crowd. "We have an extreme demand to govern in the best way possible, from the standpoint of, particularly, transparency, accountability, participation—the ability to participate in government—and efficiency, obviously. And in order to figure out how to do that optimally, we really need help. And we need to help each other across all the different sort of lines of demarcation that traditionally segregate our work into different organizations or particular roles."

Mr. Hoppin was at Capitol Camp, an all-day “unconference” hosted and organized by the NYS office of the chief information officer and his own team. Since he was hired in late January by Malcolm Smith, then the Senate majority leader, and Senate secretary Angelo Aponte, Mr. Hoppin and his young tech-whiz recruits have been working on their Obama campaign-inspired revamp of the Senate's Web site and services in order to, as Mr. Hoppin told The Observer in March, bring back-door conversations and government data and empower constituents.

On Monday, June 7, just three days after Capitol Camp, the Senate would flip out of control with Republicans briefly gaining a 32-30 edge in the chamber—ousting tech patron Mr. Smith from his majority role.

“Came to Albany with one shirt Sunday evening; still wearing it,” Mr. Hoppin wrote on his Twitter feed on June 10. “[A]lso just ate first food of the day, but that part isn't unusual since Feb.”

As Democrats and Republicans continue to wrestle for control in Albany, and as the threat of a power change looms, Mr. Hoppin and his team have been continuing to pump up the Web site they launched in May, nysenate.gov, including blog posts from senators and other statements about the recent upheaval. They’ve also made modifications that allow constituents to give direct feedback to Senators on proposed bills, hearings and issues in "crowdsourcing portals" for property taxes, ethics reform and campaign finance.

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