Or more precisely, the Legislature.
I’ve been looking at ways to keep track of what goes on in Dover, which means looking beyond the NJ. The State’s website actually provides some useful tools that were new to me, so I thought I would share some of these for the (probably very few of you) who didn’t know, either (note, RSS links prompt you to add feed to a reader):
- RSS feed for Introduced Legislation (for both houses)
- RSS feed for House Passed Legislation
- RSS feed for Senate Passed Legislation
- RSS feed for Signed Legislation
- MyLis by which you can indicate legislation you want to track and you will get email notice of changes in status. This you have to register for.
- Delaware Legislative Actions Notice which is another subscription service to get notice of legislative actions. Some of you may already be signed up to this service for school closings or school announcements.
While I haven’t yet tried the last two services, the RSS feeds are pretty good and are very convenient to access via my already too full newsreader. Clicking on the title will get you an expansion of the entry and clicking on the arrow (I’m using Google News) takes you to the Legislature website so you can get more information. The website provides the usual stuff — schedules, press releases and so on, but also provides a link in the middle of the page to listen to the House when it is in session.
Of course we can’t afford it, but certainly live video streaming of the sessions would be a good addition, but I think that podcasts of each committee or task force session would be ideal. A staff directory would be useful, but it seems easy enough to communicate directly with the legislator. Another idea is to use a blog or forum template to solicit input on big issues. For instance, the Minnesota Senate is asking citizens to weigh in on the budget. The drawback may be that you don’t get many people to participate as seems the case here — but I talked to two typically clued in friends of mine in MN who hadn’t heard of this at all. Implement something like this and I would even volunteer to moderate it — if something like this becomes the NJ comments it will never be useful.
So what else? How do you keep track of what the Legislature is doing and what have I missed? Do you have any ideas for the State’s webmaster to implement better web-based tools that would help (when we can afford it)?
ps. There are more RSS feeds for other Departments or state info which is very interesting.