[1st-mile-nm] IT at NM Legislature

[Richard Lowenberg]

2013 Legislature: Capitol IT team tackles technical glitches

Staci Matlock | The New Mexican
Posted: Sunday, February 17, 2013

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Local%20News/021813xgrwebsite#.USJPt-jwPmw

Hackers, webcam crashes and network glitches are all in a day’s work 
for the Legislature’s Web and IT team during the session.

The five-person IT team is housed in the Legislative Council Service 
offices.

Ralph Vincent, an IT contractor, said he started helping automate 
budgets and other work for the Legislature after 1990.

The first Legislative website he helped launch in the mid-1990s had 
just the basics: Legislators’ names, committee information and a basic 
bill tracker. Every year, there are more links and information available 
through the site. “I don’t know that we’ve changed the website as much 
as added to it,” Vincent said, adding that the ongoing goal for the 
website is to keep it simple and accessible, if not flashy.

They made sure documents on the website were available in HTML and PDF 
format, to accommodate people who only had access to slow processing and 
low bandwidth for their computers.

The Legislative Council Service drafts bills, memorials and resolutions 
as requested by lawmakers. Once entered in the Legislature’s database 
and given a control number, the thousands of pages of documents 
generated each session are easier to track. “The links you see on the 
site, almost every page is dynamic. So it is generated based on 
databases,” Vincent said.

“Pretty much everything is automated now [via software], except for 
getting documents from here to there,” Vincent said.

The “here to there” is the daily updates to legislation as it moves 
through the lawmaking process. Those updates are handled by bill 
historians and other staff from the Legislative Council Service, who 
record committee and floor votes and amendments.

The computer tracks changes to the bills via the control number and 
sends the documents out automatically to several places at once, 
including the website’s bill locator. It creates links on the website 
between various documents.

The Web team also added committee calendar schedules to the website and 
a custom “Bill Tracker.”

One of the biggest changes in the last few years was the addition of 
audio and video streaming. Three years ago, the House approved audio 
streaming for the floor sessions and the Senate approved audio and video 
streaming for its floor sessions. Multiple webcams were added in 2011. 
This year, both the House and Senate approved webcams in committee 
hearings.

The streaming has proven so popular that the sites continue to crash 
periodically under the traffic. “The number of people watching sessions 
through the webcams has gone up significantly,” Vincent said.

Each time the team increased the bandwidth thinking it would handle 
viewer traffic, the traffic caught up. “It is better, but still not as 
good as we would like,” Vincent said. “We’re always trying to keep up.”

At any given time during the session now, they’ll have eight streams of 
audio and video to manage simultaneously.

The BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, open policy at the Legislature 
challenges the IT team to get all legislators and their staffs networked 
on new equipment each session.

The Legislature does have a Twitter feed and boasts more than 1,700 
followers so far. The tweets are handled by John Yaeger, the LCS 
assistant director for legislative affairs and a few other staff. “We 
have to be careful what we tweet because the LCS is nonpartisan,” Yaeger 
said.

But there’s no Facebook page — yet.

Security is always an ongoing challenge for the IT team, said Mark 
Guillen, IT manager. So far, they’ve been able to prevent any major 
hacking. “We’re hit with a lot of intrusions from China and Russia,” 
Guillen said.



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Richard Lowenberg, Executive Dir.
1st-Mile Institute, 505-603-5200
Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
www.1st-mile.com  rl at 1st-mile.com
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