Sheldon Rampton on the New York State Senate

Sheldon Rampton is currently the lead Drupal Developer for the New York State Senate website. At DrupalCon San Francisco, the team released a lot of their custom modules under the umbrella project of NYSS. Sheldon talks a bit about the cluster of glue modules as well as other functionality that they broke out into other modules such as Open Legislation Drupal integration with their custom Open Legislation java platform that allows citizens to browse, search and share legislative information from the New York State Senate. He also mentions the Whitelist module as well as future plans for implementing deep linking to videos via transcripts scraped from the YouTube Closed Captioning API.

Drupal is helping to facilitate more transparent and open government in the New York State Senate, and Sheldon talks about how he hopes how the releasing of some of their source code will inspire other state and local governments to start customizing and implementing Drupal sites similar to NYSS. The NYSS team doesn't have a lot of extra time to help set up the Drupal infrastructure for other government entities, but they are encouraging members from the Drupal community to jump in and help out where they can in refining and spreading the modules that are a part of their platform.

For more information, check out the Open Source in Government Keynote panel discussion featuring Andrew Hoppin, who is the CIO of the NY State Senate.