Developers Network

Getting Started

Welcome to the New York State Senate developer’s forum.  Our goal is to help any technologist interested in how technology is used in the Senate to easily find what they’re looking for, and to be able to interact directly with Senate technology staff. From email lists to Feeds to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to our source code, this forum pulls all relevant technology resources together in one spot for developers to learn from and use.

• Connect with other developers in the Developers Forum Email List or in IRC on Freenode at #NYSSDev 
• Consume our RSS Feeds
• Develop your application to use our APIs.
• Download our source code.

How to stay connected?

While many of our projects have their own individual forums for communication, the Senate has created “one list to rule them all.”  In our NY Senate Developers Network, you will find announcements of new projects, updates to preexisting projects and general news from and about the Government 2.0 community.*

Join the NY Senate Developers Network at http://groups.google.com/group/nyss-dev or join us via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) at irc.freenode.net #NYSSDev

Feeds (RSS)

NYSenate.gov - we have several hundred feeds for you to choose from. Primarily, these feeds are RSS 2.0 format and iCal. We have standardized our feeds for: Senators, Committees, Newsrooms, Videos, Calendars (RSS and iCal), Open Data and Initiatives. 

Read More

Open Legislation is the Senate’s version of New York’s Legislative Research Service. In addition to providing an intuitive keyword search interface, it produces RSS, XML and JSON feeds for Bills, Calendars (e.g. schedules of bills to be voted on), Meetings, Transcripts, Actions, Votes, and supports public commenting on bills.

Read More

Newsclips is an internal service you can use to see the same newsclips that Senators read. We are working on developing RSS feeds per Senator and per Topic. Once this is set up, we’ll send out a message to NY Senate Developers Network.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

NYSenate.gov
The New York State Senate website (www.nysenate.gov) provides application programming interfaces (APIs) through which external computers and websites can retrieve information about Senators, committees, legislation, meetings and other Senate-related events. The information is available via XML-RPC or JSON. To use the Senate’s APIs, you will need to apply for an API key. For documentation about the Senate’s API, visit http://www.nysenate.gov/developers/apis.

Open Legislation
Browse, search and share legislative information with single search. Find the bills, votes, minutes and calendars that make define your state Senate. For documentation about Open Legislation's API, visit http://openlegislation.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

Senate Address Geocoding Engine (SAGE)
Currently, SAGE doesn’t have any public facing APIs, but we are planning on releasing some soon. Join the NY Senate Developers Network and stay tuned.

Source Code

Drupal Code 

• Code for NYSenate.gov, visit http://drupal.org/project/nyss
• Code for CiviCRM / Bluebird, visit http://github.com/nysenate/Bluebird-CRM.

OpenLegislation

• Visit GitHub at http://github.com/nysenate/OpenLegislation/

Mobile Apps

• For the Android and iPhone and iPod Touch, visit GitHub at http://github.com/nysenate/NYSenateMobileApp
• For the iPad app, visit http://github.com/nysenate/NYSenateForIPad 

NewsClips

• Visit GitHub at http://github.com/nysenate/Newsclips

GeoServer / Senate Address Geocoding Engine (SAGE) 

• Visit GitHub at http://github.com/nysenate/GeoApi
• Geocoding services for SAGE are provided by Yahoo! PlaceFinder.

OpenDirectory

• Visit GitHub at http://github.com/nysenate/OpenDirectory

BillBuzz

• Visit GitHub at http://github.com/nysenate/BillBuzz

For other apps, check out our GitHub, http://github.com/nysenate, or subscribe to the NY Senate Developers Network 

Notes for all developers

• All of our software code respects its original license.  All software developed from within the New York State Senate is dual licensed under GPLv3 and BSD licenses. You can find more information on our Open-Source and Software Licenses page at http://www.nysenate.gov/Open-Source-Software-Licenses
• Opinions expressed on any of our developers lists are attributable only to that person, and do not represent the New York State Senate; off-topic conversations will be moderated.