Tomorrow night at 6PM Pacific time / 9PM Eastern, Andrew Hoppin,Chief Information Officer for the New York State Senate, will join JayAckroyd at InWorld Studios in Second Life for a discussion on tech upgrades in the rather contentious political climate of Albany, political consulting, working with NASA, and lots more!
For scoop on how to quickly get into Second Life please see this fine diary by Moody Loner. If you can't make it "inworld" to Second Life check out our BlogTalkRadio link on the upper left of the Virtually Speaking homesite!
More, much more, below the break!
The New York Senate's Image Problem
Andrew Hoppin, the newly minted Chief Information Officer for the New York State Senate, is gearing up to reform the image of the New York Senate– and it’s not even the problem you might be thinking of.
You see, Andrew has bigger fish to fry than feuding politicians. From Gillian Reagan of the New York Observer:
Early this month, New York State Senate chief information officer Andrew Hoppin stood behind a podium in the airy, ornate State House, dressed in a casual gray suit, with a red name tag stuck to his jacket, and delivered a speech about how technology could help fix the state government’s reputation as a notoriously outdated and corrupt.
"We can't afford in government to not innovate," he told the crowd. "We have an extreme demand to govern in the best way possible, from the standpoint of, particularly, transparency, accountability, participation—the ability to participate in government—and efficiency, obviously. And in order to figure out how to do that optimally, we really need help. And we need to help each other across all the different sort of lines of demarcation that traditionally segregate our work into different organizations or particular roles."
With a Democratic Majority for the first time in 43 years - Andrew Hoppin is working on a technology-driven effort to aggressively improve government transparency & efficiency in Albany.
More from the Observer article –
Since he was hired in late January by Malcolm Smith, then the Senate majority leader, and Senate secretary Angelo Aponte, Mr. Hoppin and his young tech-whiz recruits have been working on their Obama campaign-inspired revamp of the Senate's Web site and services in order to ...bring back-door conversations and government data and empower constituents.
Of course, not even the speed of technology can outrun Teh Stoopid. As of June 7, Albany is in turmoil as not one but two Democrats in grave danger of jail time in their near-term futures decided to test the waters of Republicanism. The result was, one might say, a disruption in the tech and transparency upgrade...
....Mr. Hoppin and his crew have been working hard to ensure that no matter what happens—say, if the Republicans secure control of the Senate and replace them—they’ll have left their mark not just on Albany, but on government in general.
....
Mr. Hoppin said he and his team have been working on both sides of the aisle—Republicans and Democrats—through the upgrades. "We've been working in a trans-partisan way with technology in the Senate, so we've got a lot of advocates. ... That significantly increases the chance, I would say, that the nature of our work would be continued to some degree regardless of who is here to do it," he said.
Of course, that might be optimistic. This is a big tech change, and it is closely associated with Malcolm Smith who, it being New York politics, has friends and.. people who are not exactly friends. And some of these are Republicans.
So, we have a whole lot to talk about.
That’s right. Tomorrow night, at 9PM Eastern/6pm Pacific Time, Andrew Hoppin will be appearing on Virtually Speaking, available on BlogTalkRadio and hosted out of Second Life, to talk with host Jimbo Hoyer about creating transparency through technology in New York, the Obama campaign, working with NASA, and more.
If you can, join us in Second Life at InWorld Studios.
For viewers in Second Life, Virtually Speaking is more than a graphically enhanced radio show. It is an opportunity to ask questions and exchange information, to learn from Andrew and from each other. Perhaps some biographical info might be helpful.
More on Andrew
Back in 2003, Andrew founded New York for Clark, the largest local group in the Draft Clark movement. He later joined the staff of Wesley Clark for President to help manage the campaign’s voter data and, he says, the nation’s first open-source campaign software volunteer program.
In 2006, he entered Second Life under the name Drew Frobozz and co-created the "RootsCamp" political meetings. He then helped develop the inaugural Yearly Kos (now Netroots Nation) "virtual convention" in Second Life in 2007.
Since then, Andrew has worked with an online political campaign technology company and an advertising network for socially responsible businesses. He also co-founded and helped manage the NASA CoLab at NASA Ames Research Center, the Second Life version of which has since outlasted its "RL" (real life) analogue at Ames.
As an entrepreneur, Andrew co-founded and directed business development for GoodStorm (now Zazzle), a progressive eCommerce venture that helps organizations raise money to support themselves, Trellon, a leading open-source software consulting firm for online community building, and Moonfront, an aerospace design consulting firm.
Andrew directed business strategy for CivicSpace Labs, a developer of software and communities for online organizing and advocacy, and, as a consultant, executed marketing campaigns for leading technology startups such as mobile messaging provider Jaiku (now Google) and online geographic data provider N Space Labs. He consulted with leading technology-driven non-profit organizations such as the Craigslist Foundation on online strategy.
Andrew serves on the advisory boards of Netroots Nation (formerly Yearly Kos), the Space Generation Foundation, Yenza and the New Organizing Institute, and also represent the Space Generation Advisory Council at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UN ECOSOC) in New York.
A graduate of the NASA Academy and the International Space University, Andrew holds bachelors and masters degrees from Brown University and Berkeley in Planetary Sciences and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management respectively.
He recently decided that long-form blogging just isn’t what it used to be and that Twitter is a much more manageable thought-sharing and amplifying medium.
About Virtually Speaking
Virtually Speaking with Jimbo Hoyer is a regular public affairs program, featuring live, in-depth, intelligent conversations with opinion leaders before a virtual studio audience. Programs are simulcast on Blog Talk Radio. CS Kendrick is the alternative show host. Widget Whiteberry dresses the set, develop resource and promote Virtually Speaking on the net. Pebea Quandary creates guest avatars. Dire Lobo manages sound.
Bookem Streeter stocks the books at Jackson Street Books online <http://tinyurl.com/df6r7h>, Pb Recreant provides support - and DJs afterwards.
Help us spread the word!
- Follow the schedule and post pictures, questions/comments to the forum at
http://virtuallyspeaking.ning.com/
- Join the Virtually Speaking group if you are in Secondlife!
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Contact: Widget Whiteberry
(Each week, I create a notecard for the show and pass it around to various bloggers. Let me know if you would like to be on that list.)
About Netroots Nation in Second Life
This will be the third year that NN will have a presence in a virtual world. Its purpose is more than providing a complementary experience to the physical convention; it is a way to extend through media, social media and virtual geography the community building experience that heretofore persons had to travel to meet face to face to develop. The rules and norms are analogous to "RL" (real life), though there are some challenges that as a new mode of social existence that SL residents are still working through. This is a social as well as technological frontier.
In this year of economic downturn, despite lower airfares and hotel rates many persons who might otherwise have attended the NN convention in person are thinking otherwise.
We invite you to consider a second option..Netroots Nation in Second Life.