New York Observer

Various winners in City Council primaries gathered with members of Common Cause New York on the steps of City Hall today to castigate the influence of independent expenditures, especially Jobs for New York, a group backed by real estate interests.

'Campaign finance is a great equalizer, it allows idealist candidates who are reformers to get elected without being in debt to the very special interest we are running against. In my race the most frequent contribution was 10 dollars,' said Mr. Kallos.

Here's a new web site that is intended to serve as a public calendar for all those political events happening around New York.

The New York State Senate's chief information officer team just launched an early version of their Open Legislation Portal today.

Mr. Hoppin and his team will update the site by the end of the month with more information that "has never been seen before on the Internet," according to Mr. Hoppin, thanks to the rules reforms passed by the Senate in June. The data collected, which was previously only available by enacting the Freedom of Information Act, will include detailed transcripts of sessions, committee votes and committee attendance.

As the Observer reported in June, Ben Kallos, former chief of staff to Assemblyman Jonathan Bing who was working on Mark Green's campaign, launched NewYork.OpenLegislation.org, which allowed users see how each lawmaker voted on a particular piece of legislation and see whether lawmakers  attended their  committee meetings. Mr. Kallos and a few of his colleagues paid for the site out of his own pocket.

The state's moves to make this kind of data more available to the public are ahead of City Hall, where Gale Brewer, chair of the Council's Technology in Government Committee, is leading the open legislation charge.

Ben Kallos, former chief of staff to Assemblyman Jonathan Bing who is currently working on Mark Green's campaign, is launching a new Web site that allows users to search the attendance records of state lawmakers, making available information that the state isn’t so quick to provide. (Ask folks in the Albany press corps about that.)

Mr. Kallos has kept himself busy, putting his knowledge of technology and geeky insights to use in local government. The result is a series of Web sites that take local political info out of dusty file cabinets and up online. One site lets people see if they’re registered to vote. Another lets users check the attendance records of state lawmakers. His latest creation: a crowd-sourced calendar for political events around New York City and the state.