NALIT Newsletter

Summer 2006    (Printer-friendly version) 

Inside this issue:

Chair's Corner
The New Mobile Legislators: A Texas Perspective
Regaining SANity
Minnesota House Converts to VoIP Telephones
The Professional Journal of the American Society of Legislative Clerks and Secretaries–check it out!
Preliminary Agenda National Association of Legislative Information Technology NCSL Annual Meeting
Washington State Legislature's Mission to Mars:Another Legacy System Bites the Dust
Tenth Annual NALIT Professional Development Seminar
Editor’s Corner

Chair's Corner

By Gary Wieman, Nebraska

Hope this edition of the NALIT newsletter finds you well. Much is occurring behind the scenes with planning for the NCSL Annual meeting, proposed changes to the NALIT bylaws, a soon to be updated version of the NALIT state survey, and the Professional Development Seminar planning. Please read further to see the excellent work your offices and committee members have done for you.

The NALIT agenda for the NCSL Annual meeting should have appeal not only to our members, but also to legislators and legislative staff as well. The planning committee has done an excellent job in defining topics and naming the sessions such that the sessions should attract the attention of many of the attendees. Titles for the NALIT sponsored sessions include: “You Are Not Anonymous,” a look how data on your state owned system may not be as private as you thought; “Picking Up the Pieces After Katrina and Rita,” a discussion of how a major disaster affects the legislature; “TechTalk – on Smartphones, PDAs and VoIP,” the latest communication devices and methods; “Secure: Are You Sure?,” all the latest on malware, phishing, and other system breaches; and “Constituent Services Software,” software developed in Missouri and Texas. If you know of a legislator or staffer that will be attending the meeting, let them know of these timely topics that are sponsored by NALIT.

During the NCSL Annual Meeting, the NALIT Executive Committee will be proposing amendments to our bylaws during the business meeting. The amendments will include updates to our membership classification and clarifying of who can vote for officers and on bylaw changes. The updates should be posted shortly if you have not already been notified. To vote on the changes, you must be a NALIT member and in attendance at the business meeting.

The new NALIT Legislative Information Technology Survey will soon be available for input of your information. The Survey Committee went through several revisions to get the responses updated, to add new questions, and to regroup several of the sections. The Virginia House, thanks to an offer by Sharon Crouch Steidel, will be hosting the survey on its site with the new survey software they purchased. This will hopefully provide an easy means for updating your responses and reporting results to NALIT members.

The PDS Planning Committee has also set the agenda for our Professional Development Seminar this fall in Washington, D.C. Pam Greenberg has an article in this newsletter highlighting the topics and events that will occur at the seminar. I encourage you to attend so you may gain from the experiences of your colleagues and friends who endeavor to make legislative work more productive through use of technology. Hopefully, if you made that effort to encourage a legislator or staffer to attend a NALIT session at the Annual Meeting, they will see the benefit and will assist in the process to attend the PDS.

Finally, I would like to thank Gary Schaefer for his excellent work in compiling the past two newsletters. Until you have done it, you cannot understand the effort required to accumulate and organize the articles. I would also like to thank Pam Greenberg who assists in finding or writing articles, and in doing an exceptional job of organizing and maintaining NALIT information.

Regards,  

Gary Wieman
Chair/Vice Chair, NALIT Executive Committee

The New Mobile Legislator: A Texas Perspective

By David Elder

Information Technology (IT) shops in state governments face the interesting challenge of adapting current technologies and ideologies to the culture of a mobile society. Each legislative session brings us closer to providing support to a vast array of devices and platforms.

 The Texas Legislature is no exception to the ever-changing face of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and Personal Information Managers (PIMs) and to the desire of legislative members and staff to use the technology.

Challenges:

• Finding a standard in a immature and rapidly changing market
• Funding
• Support staff and resource limitations
• Training

We have adopted Microsoft Outlook and Exchange services, which have provided some standardization and advantages in the context of mobile technology. Many types of devices being used today can be adapted to receive data from the Exchange services system, whether it is through wireless connectivity or cradle synchronization.

Challenge #1. Chasing a standard.

Most devices offer similar services (e.g., phone, e-mail, web services). Because Texas does not purchase the devices for the legislators or their staff, we have become adept at working with several different types.

The Blackberry and Treo are the most prevalent devices used by Texas legislators and staff. Our experience and performance testing have proven that the Blackberry and RIM technologies are the most stable and usable in our environment. We have incorporated a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) into the system. Device costs and wireless provider plans, including air time and data services, remain the responsibility of the user. However, we provide the licensing and costs associated with the BES. The BES provides real-time access to legislative e-mail, calendar appointments, notes, tasks, and contacts. The Treo 600 series phones can also be used with the Exchange services to receive wireless e-mail. Other services available with the Treo must be done with a cradle and synchronization.

Challenge #2. Who pays for this stuff?

Because legislators and staff are responsible for buying the devices and the service provider expenses, the Texas Legislative Council has incurred only the cost of enterprise licensing for the BES and a site license for Intellisync synchronization software for use with older or less accommodating devices. As a result, the overall cost to the legislature has been relatively small. Device and service provider expenses for IT support staff add expense, but again, a small one compared to the cost of providing a standard device and service provider. The initial investment (first-year cost) was less than $25,000, and the subsequent years, including maintenance, additional licenses for the BES service, and variable costs related to test devices, are less than $10,000 annually.

Challenge #3. Who fixes this stuff?

IT support staff at the Texas Legislative Council has adapted experience and familiarity with test devices into efficient real-life support. It is not unrealistic to have existing staff with an intrinsic interest in evolving technology provide first-class support in an ever-changing market. Simply stated, we did not have to hire anyone to support PDAs.

Challenge #4. Where do you go to get training?

Good luck finding a Blackberry user and support training class. Most of our training centers on experience with test devices and research. We occasionally call the service providers for assistance with more complicated issues. For the most part, training is conducted in-house, which includes training the client, the support technician, and the environment. Training the environment means we publish information on our internal websites about the services we provide for the Blackberry and the Treo. This assists us with the “toy deploy” that inevitably comes a week or so after Christmas when legislative employees find all kinds of new gadgetry under the tree and bring it to work hoping it will connect to the network.

In a nutshell, we strive to provide the best service possible with the wireless devices that are in use in the Texas Legislature. We do not dictate which type of device to buy; however, we offer a “buyer’s guide” for those who are considering the purchase of a device, explaining the services and features of the devices with which we have experience.

What’s ahead for Texas?

We currently provide some web services accessible via wireless device such as RSS feeds, legislative notification, and bill information. Please visit www.capitol.state.tx.us to explore the mobile device features offered by the Texas Legislature. And for more detailed information, visit the slide show presented by the Texas delegation at the conference in October 2005.

As the PDA and PIM markets mature and demand increases, we will explore technology and tools that develop applications and web services for these types of devices. We are careful not to dive headfirst into “just because you can” technology.

Please stop by the Texas Legislature Online website at www.capitol.state.tx.us or e-mail david.elder@tlc.state.tx.us if you have questions. I may be in the capitol working with a client, but hey, I have my PDA so I can return your e-mail or send you a joke from “virtually” anywhere.

Regaining SANity

By Darryl Hazelwood

   For some time now we have been mulling over ways to shorten the time it takes to backup our data overnight. Sometimes backup took until the next morning. Our current process involves countless tapes and, during a restore process, finding the appropriate tape that contains the data that is needed is very time consuming. A miserable process for us, and for some of you, I’m sure. We have had discussions on implementing a Virtual Tape Library, which basically uses hard disk technology instead of traditional tapes. This is a great use of the technology, which allows us to perform quick backups as well as easy restorations. The Virtual Tape Library seemed like the best solution until we investigated the additional benefits of a SAN.

So what is a SAN? Webopedia defines it as the following:

Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high-speed subnetwork of shared storage devices. A storage device is a machine that contains nothing but a disk or disks for storing data.

A SAN’s architecture works in a way that makes all storage devices available to all servers on a LAN or WAN. As more storage devices are added to a SAN, these devices too will be accessible from any server in the larger network. In this case, the server merely acts as a pathway between the end user and the stored data.

Because stored data does not reside directly on any network servers, server power is utilized for business applications, and network capacity is released to the end user.

The benefits of a SAN go on and on, including, but definitely not limited to the following highlights:

• Enhanced protection of critical data can be applied to specific data and does not have to be a “global setting.”
• Data storage consolidation provides the possibility of decreased maintenance costs in hardware (servers) and additional software (backup software).
• Improves disaster recovery in that you can perform data restoration from hard drives which have the replicated data without pulling the dreaded tapes and going through a long restore process.
• Ability to add storage to the SAN without having to disrupt service.
• An extended life for your server hardware by unloading the data to a SAN.
• Reduced CPU load and storage I/O, and greatly improves server performance.

This is just a small list of the benefits derived from a SAN. Although this is a brief foray into the SAN world, you can see that a SAN can make an infrastructure more efficient as well as time and cost effective. I know that we are very anxious to get this project kicked off and hope to share our experience with you at one of our next meetings.

If anyone would like any information on the specifics of the SAN we are implementing here in Pennsylvania, please do not hesitate to e-mail me at dhazelwo@pahouse.net.

Minnesota House Converts to VoIP Telephones

By Paul Schweizer

INTRODUCTION

   In November 2005, the Minnesota House of Representatives successfully converted to a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system. Telephone conversions are a project like no other, but with a VoIP phone conversion there is the added complexity of integrating the voice services onto the data network. Nevertheless, the convergence of these two technologies went smoothly.

   A majority of Minnesota’s state agencies have made or are in the process of making this conversion as well. The impetus for most of these entities was the same—the need for cost saving because of budget reductions. Our initial estimates indicated that, although this project would require a significant one-time financial investment, there was a potential for operational cost savings of up to $100,000 per year. We thought that every month we delayed implementation was a lost opportunity for cost savings.

PROJECT TEAM

   We assembled a project team with staff from units in three departments: IT and wiring, which is in the Chief Clerk’s Office; facility management (voice services), which is in the sergeant-at-arms department; and the controller from the budget and accounting department (for cost review, contract approval and project management).

PILOT PROJECT

      We started with a pilot project in April 2005. For the pilot project, we used the VoIP product offering from the Office of Enterprise Technology (OET, formerly Intertech under the Department of Administration).

      The pilot project showed that this technology offered similar features to our then Centrex-based telephone system. The pilot participants found the technology to be reliable, and many of the participants liked the subtle feature changes. Our pilot group consisted of twelve users: two house members and ten IT staff from various departments. Overall, there were a few glitches, but the pilot project was successful and offered valuable experience for our IT and voice services staff.

      Pilot project members participated in a feedback meeting after the first month of service. We found that there were some quality of service issues, and some house staff were concerned about the reliability of any VoIP system. We decided to go full scale with VoIP phones, but we switched vendors. We continued to use the Cisco switches and phone sets that were purchased and installed for the pilot project.

FULL-SCALE IMPLEMENTATION

      We choose to use the local telephone service provider for our full-scale deployment. We found that this alternative offered several advantages over using OET’s product.

(1) We were offered the latest version of Cisco Call Manager; at that time OET was in the process of converting several agencies, so it did not have the flexibility to upgrade quickly to the latest software release.

(2) We were not charged an installation fee or a porting fee to keep our existing phone numbers. This saved us $75,000 compared to what we would have been charged using OET’s product. Currently, any state agency converting existing numbers to VoIP will be charged a porting fee to keep the existing number. Otherwise, agencies are given the option of obtaining new numbers at no charge; we think a wholesale change of phone numbers would have been received poorly by our members and staff.

(3) Changing vendors enabled us to make a significant change in our network design and connectivity to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). It also enabled us to bypass a number of pieces of equipment that could have slowed down or impeded voice traffic. These changes eliminated all sound quality issues and concerns.

(4) This option provided greater access to resources for project management, support and implementation.

   We installed five PRI circuits for our local calls and one PRI to handle our long distance. Our calls go through our LAN as digital traffic, but are then sent over the PSTN to its final destination.

   We used a two-phase implementation schedule. During Phase I, all non-partisan departments were converted; this was approximately 150 lines. Ten days later we converted the Phase II users groups. In this phase, which included all house members (134), all committee staff and all caucus staff, approximately 250 lines were converted.

   All phone sets were deployed to users’ desks approximately one to two weeks before conversion. This allowed staff the opportunity to try out some of the features of the new phones before going live.

CONTRACT

   We negotiated a purchase, lease and service contract with the following key contract terms:

• The house purchased the Cisco telephone sets.
• Two-year service contract.
• The contracts include local and long distance phone service; lease of several file servers with call manager, voice mail and emergency responder software installed; and maintenance service during normal business hours.

NETWORK

   The Minnesota House of Representatives operates in two buildings with approximately twenty-one interconnected routers/switches dispersed throughout the buildings. We use Cisco network equipment.

   All of these switches were replaced with power over Ethernet (POE) switches that would carry voice traffic. The warranty period for the replaced switches was expiring, and the switches were going to be replaced at an undetermined time in the near future. The VoIP project required early replacement.

      The leased equipment is located in the house’s centralized network computer room. We needed to make several infrastructure changes to this room, including bringing in additional uninterruptible power supply units and installing new racks.

PHONE SETS

      We purchased approximately 440 Cisco 7960G, 7902G and 7912G phone sets.

      Additional phones and equipment include:

• Expansion modules for additional line appearances for legislative assistants.
• Miscellaneous end-user equipment (headsets, extension cords, etc.).
• Reception station phone sets.

      The maintenance of the phones is included in the service contract (Monday–Friday, 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m). Some of the phone sets are spare units so that we can replace a faulty set quickly.

      The phone set is plugged into the data jack in the wall. Each user’s computer is plugged into the back of the phone set. The computer does not have to be turned on for the VoIP phone to work.

STATION REVIEWS

      Conversion to VoIP required voice services staff to perform the detailed and time consuming task of conducting comprehensive station reviews. Prior to implementation, voice service staff identified and documented the voice service requirements of each of the 400 users. This information was input into a vendor-provided database format.

911

      For our 911 service, we are using Cisco’s Emergency Responder System. Our service provider for this system is Intrado. Because Cisco’s product does not give the exact office location of the 911 caller, we had to divide our office locations into quadrants. Each telephone within the quadrant was assigned a corresponding telephone number, usually twenty telephones to one telephone number. With this in place, 911 will not only be given the address but an approximate location of the call. If a responder shows up in the quadrant and no one is present to give guidance, the responder can pick up a telephone and dial the number of the quadrant. Whatever telephone had dialed 911 will ring. This system, when programmed in the Call Manager, can also alert a designated person in the house of representatives that a 911 call has been placed. We currently have ours programmed to contact the house’s Chief Sergeant-at-Arms and his staff.

TRAINING

   We set up a small hearing room in the State Office Building as a training room. We equipped this room with twelve telephone sets and connected them to our network. Fifty house staff, representing all departments, were trained as trainers. Each department was responsible for rolling out this training to its department staff.

   We found that the basic operations of the telephone could be learned by reviewing the user guide, studying the display and phone buttons or calling the help desk. We made training materials available on the house Intranet site. In addition, short reference sheets giving instructions on the basic functions and operations of the VoIP phones were provided at the time of conversion.

   The vendor’s employees staffed an on-site help desk for two to three days after each conversion.

COST ANALYSIS

   Unlike other IT projects, the main driver of this project was to capture immediate operating cost savings (with no impact on staffing levels). The house will be paying $9.95 per month per user, including voice mail. At the time of implementation, we were paying approximately $42 per month per user for a telephone system with comparable features. A significant investment was required to capture these savings.

Investment cost:

*Most of this expense was to replace aging telephone sets.

**Most of this expense was for switches with power over Ethernet capability. Existing switches were replaced somewhat earlier than the switches otherwise would have been.

      In addition to these investments, The Minnesota House also spent approximately $177,000 on other network upgrades in the year and a half before conversion as we improved the reliability of the data network and enabled the network to handle voice traffic at a future time.

      Clearly, this project was a success. We learned that it can be both challenging and rewarding to bring staff from various departments together to accomplish significant change.

The Professional Journal of the American Society of Legislative Clerks and Secretaries — check it out!

By Gary VanLandingham and Judy Hall

      Who among us, while waiting in the dentist’s office and leafing aimlessly through magazine collections full of works such as Modern Anarchism, Southern Garden Sheds, and Celebrity Shy People, hasn’t wondered, “why isn’t there a high quality publication that has information relevant to my life as a legislative staffer?” Well, wonder no more! NCSL does, in fact, have such a publication, the Professional Journal of the American Society of Legislative Clerks and Secretaries. However, most legislative staffers have likely been unaware of the Professional Journal and how to access it.

      The Professional Journal is published twice a year and includes articles on a wide variety of topics relating to the legislative process. For example, the Fall 2005 edition contained articles addressing how legislatures can be evaluated (what makes a “good” legislature and how would we know it when we see it?), the use of consent calendars among states, how term limits affect legislative staffing, and how one state has addressed issues relating to video conferencing of committee meetings.

   The difference between the Professional Journal and NCSL’s State Legislatures magazine, which most legislative staffers receive each month, is essentially one of depth and space. While State Legislatures contains a lot of information, its focus is on state policy and articles are generally short— often only a couple of pages. In contrast, articles in the Professional Journal are often ten to fifteen pages in length, allowing for an in-depth examination of topics relating to the legislative institution. Professional Journal articles also include bibliographic references, which enable folks interested in getting more information about a topic to identify these resources readily.

   The ASLCS Professional Journal committee was created in 1993 and the first edition was published in 1996. Although many of its articles have addressed topics related to chamber management, the editors welcome manuscript submissions that would be of general interest to legislative staff, topics such as parliamentary procedures, management and technology. The articles will go through a peer-review process to ensure that they are high quality and of general interest to legislative staff. However, the Professional Journal also accepts letters to the editor which provide a forum for discussion.

   You can access the Professional Journal and view back issues via the ASLCS website at http://www.ncsl.org/programs/legman/aslcs/JournalIndex.htm Information about how to submit articles is located on page three of each edition. If you have further questions please contact Hobie Lehman, the Journal Editor, at hlehman@sov.state.va.us.

Washington State Legislature’s Mission to Mars: Another Legacy System Bites the Dust

By Ronda Tentarelli

To the Launching Pad

      Tim Rice shared with us last year that yes, Virginia (and Illinois and California), there is life after legacy systems. Gary Schaefer described Louisiana’s efforts to get off its VAX-based system. Washington State is finishing up a similar project, and the 2006 Session is the first in which all major systems are off the VAX.

      Washington State installed software from Public Systems Associates (PSA) in 1990. The software supported bill drafting, statute and administrative code codification, bill tracking, committee activities, floor and rostrum activities, and end-of-day and end-of-session reports. The Legislative Service Center (LSC) purchased the source code in 1993 and LSC staff began to enhance and maintain it ourselves.

      Then Windows and the Web hit. Beginning in 1995, LSC started reengineering systems to take advantage of graphical interfaces, hyperlinking, relational databases, the power of PCs and servers, and better development platforms. Between 1995 and 2003 we balanced reengineering efforts with development of new systems, which extended the time line considerably. Although this gave us flexibility in determining which system to tackle next, it meant that IT staff supported two technical environments. In that stretch, LSC staff reengineered bill status entry, front desk reports, bill drafting and processing, text search and retrieval (with Hummingbird KM), committee agendas, committee analyses, and statute codification.

      In 2004, with the burden on the staff to support two environments and the looming retirement of the person who understands the VAX environment in mind, LSC’s director, Cathy Munson, challenged the staff to get off the VAX by the 2006 Session. More importantly, she convinced legislative members and staff that it was in their best interests to reserve IT resources for this last push. Thus was launched the Get Off the VAX project, LSC’s mission to Mars. We called it GOTV.

Blast Off

   By the time GOTV got off the ground, LSC still supported nearly sixty VAX-based systems and components. Now it was time to reengineer the systems that present the information to staff,

legislators, and the public. We’d be moving document processes from WordPerfect and the PSA document management system to XML stored in the FileNet DMS. Instead of index-sequential, flat files in RMS, we’d be storing the data in SQL Server. For consumption purposes, people would retrieve HTML and PDF documents from a repository LSC built and data from a denormalized SQL Server database. Our development environment was .NET on Windows 2003 servers.

   The first thing LSC tackled was the Selected Bill Tracking report (SBT). The VAX-based report was canned—it was in bill number order and displayed bill numbers, flags for fiscal notes, brief descriptions, primary sponsor, and current status. You could have as many lists as you wanted, but there were no tools to organize the lists. The reengineered report lets you organize your lists in folders, provides clickable column headings for sorting, and allows you to rearrange the columns and add others. We delivered this report to internal and public customers for the 2005 Session.

   SBT is one of about twenty online reports. Beginning in February 2005, LSC tackled these reports and bill subject index entry and reporting, the daily status document, the daily and end-of-session publication of summaries and histories of all introduced legislation, amendment drafting tools for committee and caucus staff, administrative code processing, member roll call reports, and numerous utilities that looked for information on the VAX or put it there. The twenty reports are available to the public on the Legislature’s web site too. Go to http://dlr.leg.wa.gov to give them a look.

      The online reports and administrative code processing projects each took over 2,500 hours of LSC staff time, just by way of example. These hours cover requirements gathering and documentation, design, construction, developer testing, quality assurance testing, training, user documentation, and deployment. LSC has fifteen developers, four analysts-testers, fifteen direct customer support staff, and ten systems staff supporting 1,000 legislative customers during session. 

The Willow Goldfinch Has Landed

      As I write, it is the fourth week of the 2006 Regular Session. We deployed most of the applications in November, so legislative staff had a chance to use them before session started, and LSC had a chance to address maintenance items before the flood gates opened. A few times we’ve had to set someone’s permissions, deploy a stored procedure we forgot, or make a quick fix, but this stuff works! The process for creating the Daily Status report has gone from one hour to about fifteen minutes. What took the staff that creates the bill summaries eight hours at the end of session has been timed at nine minutes, fourteen seconds. The rearrangement of the pages and access to quick links make it easier for session staff to figure out what’s going on all around them. We’ll have to get through session to have a good picture of the amount of time we spent on maintenance, but we are very encouraged.

Houston, We Had a Problem

   Although we had our share of technical issues, the biggest problem turned out to be talking to customers about retention of old documents and data. Many of you have had recent experience of converting bills and related documents to XML. How many sessions did you go back? The Washington State Legislature has online bill documents going back to 1985 and bill data beginning with the first session with the PSA system, 1991.

   We took a calculated risk and suggested to our customer groups that documents before 2003 would be available in PDF and HTML by means of a navigable web-based directory and that we shouldn’t convert the pre-2003 data. Well, we got their attention anyway. For the 2006 Session we’re providing limited access to the VAX-based online reports. Even with demonstrations beginning in June, when the customers started using the navigable directory in earnest this past November, they hollered about the difficulty—things didn’t connect until they had to use it for real. Researching pre-2003 legislation in preparation for session meant analysts had to go to a different spot on the system, not to mention clicking through the directory to gather all the documents related to a bill.

   For the short term we’ve put a front end on the directory that does the navigating for the customers. The long-term solution will be converting all the data to SQL Server and may be converting all the documents to XML, so everything is accessible from the online reports. That conversion effort is underway now and is the top priority project for LSC for 2006.

The Right Stuff

   You’ll notice, perhaps, that LSC did this work without contractors or consultants. And we did it while maintaining existing applications. Here’s our secret . . . pie. During the sprint in the fall, Friday was Pie Day. Our staff evidently favors creme pies.

      Long before the institution of Pie Day, we brought .NET training in house in 2003, and all the developers learned about object-oriented programming, the .NET Framework, VB.NET, and ASP.NET. We created a new group within LSC to focus on business analysis, requirements documentation, and testing. We changed our project management processes and set some standards for project plans, status reports, and team responsibilities. Every Monday and Thursday morning, the project managers met for about a half-hour to report status and identify issues. (Project management remains a work in progress for us.) After changing some designs after fairly formal design reviews, we moved design discussions up earlier in the cycle and conducted them as idea-generating sessions, rather than reviews of nearly completed designs.

      But from where I sit as the applications manager, and some of you have shared similar experiences, the key is highly motivated, very talented staff working together to accomplish a goal to which all were committed. Those fifty people I enumerated earlier wanted to provide good solutions to business problems, give the customers cool applications, leverage new technologies, and GET OFF THE VAX!!! We pull the plug June 30. Missions accomplished.

Tenth Annual NALIT Professional Development Seminar

By Pam Greenberg

      Do not miss the 2006 NALIT Professional Development Seminar in Washington, D.C., October 10-14, 2006. This 10 th annual seminar is being coordinated by Jim Greenwalt of the Minnesota Senate. Jim is responsible for beginning the tradition of a fall seminar for NALIT. Jim hosted the first NALIT seminar in 1997 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

      The theme of this year’s seminar is Capitalizing on Convergence. Convergence technology has merged voice, video, and data, integrating telecommunications and computer technologies, and state legislatures are capitalizing on the convergence of these technologies to improve efficiency and service to lawmakers and citizens. The 2006 NALIT seminar will emphasize content and presentations that support these themes. The Legislative Information and Communications Staff Section (LINCS) will be meeting in Washington D.C. the same week, and the two groups will host some joint sessions.

   The seminar provides the unique opportunity to exchange expertise and experiences with other legislative information technology staff in informative management and technical sessions, in roundtables and at exhibits and social events. This year’s seminar also will include tours and briefings with Congressional information technology staff on Thursday, October 11.

   On Tuesday, October 10, a full day pre-conference training program will cover all aspects of digital broadcasting of legislative proceedings. Sessions during the week will look at implementing new technologies, dealing with decision makers and personnel issues, XML in the legislative environment, IT forensics, VoIP, and developing communication and negotiation skills, among other issues.

   The seminar also includes a visit to the International Spy Museum, the only public museum in the world solely dedicated to the trade craft, history, and contemporary role of espionage. Exhibits feature international espionage artifacts, combined with historic photographs, state-of-the-art audio visual programs, and computer interactive displays and special effects. After touring the museum, join us for a special dinner at the museum, sponsored by Propylon.

Information about the seminar is available at http://www.ncsl.org/programs/lis/nalit/pds06.htm. Make your plans now!

Editor’s Corner

By Gary Schaefer

      Well I cannot believe it has been a year since I was elected your secretary. For the Louisiana legislature and me, it has been a very busy year. Since the devastating hurricanes, we have had two special sessions and an eighty-five day regular session. There were even rumors we would have another special session is August or September of this year, but thankfully the governor put that rumor to rest.

      A number of bills were passed during the regular session dealing with information technology. Some of the legislation enacted dealt with the following topics:

• Acts 176 and 241 protect persons from identity theft, protects aged or infirm from theft, and imposes fines and imprisonment with or without hard labor or both.
• Act 186 requires a sexually violent predator or a child sexual predator to be monitored, when released, through use of global positioning technology for the remainder of his natural life and to pay for all or a portion of the cost of the GPS-monitoring.
• Act 224 added to the crime of indecent behavior with juveniles the crime of transmitting electronic textual communications or electronic visual communications depicting lewd or lascivious conduct, text, or images.
• Act 392 prohibits transmitting spyware, adware, or other forms of malware onto computers and provides for fines and imprisonment or both.
• Act 549 created the Anti-Phishing Act and provides for injunctive relief and civil damages.
• Act 556 prohibits and Internet service provider from disclosing personal information unless the subscriber gives permission either in writing or by electronic mail.
• Act 624 created the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise Commission located in Lafayette, Louisiana. It is a state-of-the-art visualization center housing a range of 3D display solutions including the world’s only totally immersive six-sided, digital virtual reality Cube, and the world’s largest digital 3D auditorium.
• Act 826 provides that audio or video recordings or electronic images of the proceedings of either chamber and of legislative committees, which are made self-authenticating under the Louisiana Code of Evidence shall be prima facie proof of the existence and contents of the respective proceedings contained on the recording or image.

      As you can see, we passed some interesting legislation, and I especially like the acts dealing with identity theft.

      Let me close by saying thanks again to all those who contributed to making this newsletter possible. Your time and dedication are truly appreciated. Please contact the officers listed on the last page if you need more information about NALIT activities or services. I look forward to seeing you at NCSL in Nashville and the NALIT PDS in Washington, D.C.

Gary K. Schaefer
Secretary, NALIT Executive Committee
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