More and more, technologists are applying their brain power to government from the inside, and not just among legislators — state staff are getting wise, too. In New York in 2008, a team of open-government technologists that techPresident knows well, including then-state Senate CIO Andrew Hoppin and transparency genie Noel Hidalgo, came in to the state capitol in Albany and radically opened its technology infrastructure. Besides shifting the Senate to more open-source solutions, like Drupal, they also opened its data, live-streamed Senate sessions, made data on bills and votes more easily accessible, and even published the Senate’s payroll online. They also, it should be noted, orchestrated a transfer of that infrastructure to the Republican Party’s choice of staff — so that while the leadership changed, the transparency did not.

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