Announcing: Open Legislation 1.6 "Ember Eltanin"

The NY Senate CIO team is proud to announce the public launch of Open Legislation 1.6, the sixth iteration of our open-source legislative data platform, just in time for the holidays, and more importantly, in preparation for the new 2011-2012 legislative session. This release was almost entirely concerned with improving the core engine, addressing feature requests from Senators, staff and public constituents, and fixing a large backlog of minor reported issues and bugs. Most of the work was under the covers, and so users will primarily notice the improved speed and reliability of the site and search, along with some small improvements here and there. In summary, this was a foundational release, to ensure that the Open Legislation system can continue to scale well, handle more data and users, and power more third-party applications.

You can use the service at http://open.nysenate.gov/legislation and find the open-source project at https://github.com/nysenatecio/OpenLegislation

As is our tradition, each release is codenamed with an adjective and an astronomical body, hence "Ember Eltanin":

Gamma Draconis (γ Dra, γ Draconis) is a star in the constellation Draco. It has the traditional name Etamin or Eltanin (The great serpent). 

There is also a US Navy Ship Eltanin, which has an ice-breaking hull and now works as an oceanographic research ship. Both the symbol of Draco (the great serpent or dragon) and an ice-breaking ship are good analogies to the huge effort this release was. 

An immense amount of gratitude to the CIO Team, and specifically the Open Legislation development team, anchored by Senate staffer Jared Williams, and featuring Graylin Kim, an RPI student who worked with us over the summer and fall on an extended partnership with the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software. Jared and Graylin essentially gave the Open Legislation search tier a complete heart transplant, and created the foundation for our move to our next generation 2.0 platform.

You can read more on Graylin's work through his Open Legislation development page and view his slides on the work, including a preview of the new 2.0 API, below. You can post any questions or issues on Github or find us in IRC at #nyss_openlegislation on Freenode.