[From GovAccess #066] DETAILS ON CALIFORNIA SENATE'S OUTSTANDING INTERNET-ACCESS SYSTEM >From Joel_M_Snyder@Opus1.COM Sat Oct 1 07:24:38 1994 The California Senate is undoubtedly the most advanced legislature in the United States in the range of services it provides to Internet-connected users. I've seen a number of fragmented messages come out over a variety of lists and thought people might be interested in seeing the whole breadth of services they offer. Using the services at this site, you can correspond with Senators and their staffs, find out about pending legislation, subscribe to information services (including the capability to follow a bill), do full-text searches on legislative information and more. 1) Incoming Email. All Senate staffers and Senators are on an internal email system. For those people to receive email, they have to complete a simple enrollment process; most folks have done that. You can try and guess someone's name by using this formula: First.Last@SEN.CA.GOV. For example, if you wanted to send to Linda Ronstadt, you would send to Linda.Ronstadt@SEN.CA.GOV. 2) Directory Services. You can look up email addresses by using the white pages server they've set up. NOTE: Every user has the option of NOT being listed in this server! To get to the server, you can: - use your finger command @sen.ca.gov - send mail to finger@sen.ca.gov - use your WWW browser to www.sen.ca.gov The server accepts the usual sort of fuzzy strings you'd expect a good server to handle, as well as the following special cases: - "help" (finger help@sen.ca.gov) - "senator" - gives you a list of real live senators who want to receive email addressed to them directly (as opposed to their staff members) 3) Senator Information Files If you don't know who your senator is, you can always look it up by FINGERing your ZIP code. For example, if you lived in Beverly Hills, you could: finger 90210@sen.ca.gov to see who your Senator is. This server also returns lots of information about each Senator, including addresses, biography, committees, etc. 4) FTP Server An FTP server (at FTP.SEN.CA.GOV) is available with information on the Senate, Senators, and various senate committees and offices (including the Senate Office of Research, which does a lot of cool reports). 5) Gopher Server The Gopher server (at Gopher.SEN.CA.GOV) lets you access everything on the FTP server plus the entire California code and statutes and constitution, all pending Bills before the legislature, and other Senate and Legislative information. This server maintains the most comprehensive set of links to other State legislatures available in GopherSpace. You can also do full-text searches of the pending bill files to find bills which might be of interest to you. 6) Senate News service (and mail server) Senate News is a mail-based service which lets you subscribe to topics of interest (such as bulletins from senators, committee reports, etc) and be emailed information (or simply notifications about information) whenever the system changes. You can also use the mail server to do bill topic searches and to retrieve bill files. Send an email message to senate-news@sen.ca.gov with a text of "help" to get the help file. A new service in Senate News lets you follow a bill as it passes through the legislature. Once you've identified a bill you're interested in, you can subscribe to it (through senate-news) and anytime the bill changes, is analyzed, or has a status change (e.g., voting, vetoes, etc), you'll get mailed the changes (or a notification of the changes). 7) WWW Server The WWW server (at WWW.SEN.CA.GOV) is a new service which lets you do full text searches of bills pending before the legislature, access all the information available in the Gopher server, and other tasks (such as white pages lookups). This is slowly being expanded. There are other services available to internal users, such as a full USENET news feed and Clarinet news service, but these are not available to external users. IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS: I speak in no way, shape, or form for the California Senate Rules Committee. They reserve the right to call me a lyin' bastard anytime they want. None of this represents a commitment to continue service from that site. SEN.CA.GOV site does not operate to satisfy the requirements of any law or budget item. If you want to see what AB 1624 requires, FTP to leginfo.public.ca.gov. If you want this project to be continued, call your Senator and tell him or her how cool you think SEN.CA.GOV is! If you want any advice on the technology or tools used to implement this service, I'd be happy to talk to you about it (since I did most of the implementation). If you want to congratulate the person who thought this up, got the funding, ran the political hurdles, and continues to do the real hard work, write to Dennis.Miller@SEN.CA.GOV (or call the Pro Tem in charge of Senate Rules, Senator Bill Lockyer at 916-445-6671 or c/o State Capitol Rm. 205, Sacto, 95814). If you have questions about the legislative process or want to know something about a bill or whatever ... we don't have anyone to answer those questions; call your Senator (see (2) above). === Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719 Phone: +1 602 324 0494 (voice) +1 602 324 0495 (FAX) jms@Opus1.COM Opus One