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California Assembly Installs Laptops For Floor Sessions
By:
William E. Behnk
LIS Coordinator, California Legislative Data Center
Volume 2, Number 1 Spring 1996
© Journal of the American Society of Legislative Clerks and Secretaries
ASLCS Home Page
When the California State Assembly convened on January 4 for the 1995-96 legislative session, the 80 Members were greeted with new laptop computers. The Assembly Floor System (AFS) had become a reality.
Developed by the Legislative Data Center (LDC) at the direction of the Assembly Rules Committee and the Chief Clerk, the new system reduces the paper blizzard usually found on each Member's desk. The new system is designed to expedite the process of considering the thousands of bills that are debated each year.
Design Features
The key elements of the new system were developed under the careful guidance of the Chief Clerk and a user group composed of Assembly Members. The three most important design criteria were: 1) response time - to keep pace with fast-moving sessions, 2) ease of use, and 3) a need to keep the system focused on the legislative activities in the Chamber. A prototype using three desktop computers was installed during August of 1994, the busiest month of the two-year session. Its capabilities were tested by the user group and other Members, refinements were made, and authorization given for full implementation by January 1995. While the prototype utilized full size monitors with touchscreen capability, laptops were chosen because of limited desk space and importance of preserving the Chamber's historical character.
The system features the capacity to follow the agenda as each item is considered. The laptop computer screen automatically displays Daily Agenda Information for each bill as it is called up on the display board by the Reading Clerk. This is the default information display and does not require that a Member interact with the system. It was decided that the agenda would be the default, but some Members have recently expressed interest in choosing their own default position, such as bill analysis, bill digest, or the Caucus analysis.
The information displayed on the laptop computer automatically moves from bill to bill without prompting by the Member. The real power of the system, however, comes from the capability to easily display items of information essential for making decisions about the bill under consideration. A series of icons is available at the bottom of the screen that allows a Member to display the bill digest, bill analysis, current status, complete bill history and previous votes on the bill - either in summary form or by Member. The complete text of any version of the bill is available, and it is also possible to view all information on the daily agenda either by Item Number, by Bill Number or by Author. Members can also send messages to each other during the floor session.
The Members may use either the touch feature, a pen or a track ball to activate an icon and thereby initiate an operation. The keyboard is not needed for the floor system. In order to provide subsecond response time, all of the above information for all components for all bills listed on the day's agenda is downloaded to the AFS servers before each session.
If a Member desires to view any information about a bill that is not on the agenda, and therefore not in the AFS server database, the Member touches an icon to retrieve the desired information from the Legislative Inquiry System (LIS) on the Data Center's IBM mainframe computer. This access takes slightly longer, but once any item of information is retrieved and stored in the AFS server, all additional requests for the information are satisfied by the local AFS server.
Scroll buttons on the right side of the screen allow moving up or down within a selected document. A simple touch pad on another window allows the selection of bill information by either bill number or agenda item number. Once a Member selects other information on a bill, such as bill text, they are effectively in a user-controlled mode. As the floor moves on to other items, the Member stays on the selected bill information. It is then possible to move from bill text to bill analysis, to votes or to other information for a bill. There is an indicator at the top of the screen to display the current status of the floor session (bill number and item number). Members return to the session's pending bill at any time by touching the "Return to Session" icon. Printing of all information except bill text is possible at printers located at each side of the Chamber using the "Print" icon. While all displayed information could be printed, some limitations have been imposed for practical reasons. For example, the printing of bill text is not currently allowed because a printer could be unavailable for extended periods of time if lengthy bills were printed.
Since the initial roll-out of the system, several features have been added. The first was the addition of proposed amendments and associated analyses. The new amendment process is tied to an existing Amendment Tracking System used by the Desk staff to track and report on amendments placed across the Assembly Desk. The system was enhanced to receive the complete text of the amendments and associated analyses and to control the distribution of this information to Member laptops. When amendments are filed at the Desk, Desk staff scan the amendment identification number and enter the amendment security number to access the amendment. The system allows the Desk staff to release to Member laptops the proposed amendments and associated analyses individually or in batches and to remove from Member laptops withdrawn amendments.
The second major enhancement to the system is bills with page and line numbers displayed exactly as they appear on the printed bill. The new bill text is in "postscript format" and replaces the previous version of the bill text displayed on the laptops which did not contain page and line numbers. The new bill text feature with page and line numbers supports a special "go to" page option that uses a touch screen keypad to select the number of the page to be displayed.
Technical Data
The Assembly Floor System is driven by a sophisticated DAKtronics voting system installed at the Assembly Desk in the front of the Chamber. The NEC Versa laptop was chosen because of its touch and pen-based capability. Each laptop has a 340 megabyte hard drive, 20 megabytes of RAM, a 9.5" active matrix color screen, and an Ethernet PCMCIA adapter.
There are two IBM PS/2 Model 95 AFS servers located in the Capitol, each with 31/2 gigabytes of disk space and 64 megabytes of RAM. Each server typically is used by 40 Members in the Chamber, but in the event of failure, one server is capable of running the AFS for all 80 Members with little difference in response time.
The system software is OS/2 WARP 3.0 on the laptops, and OS/2 v. 2.11 on the servers. There is no technical reason not to use OS/2 3.0 for the servers, but it was not available at the time of installation. The primary programming tool used to develop the custom AFS application was Hockware's VisProREXX. VisProREXX uses REXX as its programming language and allows the rapid development of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) based application for OS/2. VisProREXX also allows for the use of OS/2's multi-thread capability. This allows the floor system application to run as several components, but still as one application. By splitting programs into several segments, program processing for the screen/user interaction and "next item" message processing was enhanced. This allowed for a much more responsive system with excellent performance among all components.
The entire Assembly Chamber was rewired during the Fall of 1994 with fiber optic cable to all Members' Desks. The Ethernet protocol is used on the floor with Token Ring connecting the servers to the mainframe. 10 Base T cables connect each laptop to the Network. The fiber optic cables could use either Token Ring or Ethernet protocols; however, for device compatibility reasons, Ethernet was chosen. The full bandwidth of the fiber is not fully utilized today. However, by choosing fiber, several other issues were also addressed. One, the fiber is immune to "noise" created by other cables lying under the floor, and two, future growth is possible without disrupting the Chamber for additional cabling.
Training and Future Enhancements
Legislative Data Center staff are available in the Chamber to train and assist Members before, during and after each floor session. Suggestions for future enhancements will come from the Assembly Members and the staff of the Chief Clerk. Planned enhancements include the capability for the Members to communicate with their Capital and District Offices via E-mail. It is further planned to make laptops available at the press desks in the rear of the Chamber.
Automation within the Assembly Chamber has been an ongoing process. The voting system has been regularly upgraded. The Bill History Clerks use a client/server application to record history actions and publish the Daily and Weekly Histories. The File Clerks use Interleaf publishing software on SUN workstations to prepare each day's File (Agenda). The Daily File can total 500 pages during the busiest part of the Session. The Chief Clerk has also implemented an Amendment Tracking System (ATS) used to keep track of amendments at the Desk by means of bar codes placed on each proposed amendment. The History, Daily File and ATS application were all designed and implemented by the Legislative Data Center with direction and input from the Chief Clerk of the Assembly.
Assembly and LDC staff visited the Michigan Senate and the Florida House of Representatives to better understand their floor automation systems. Valuable information was gathered as a result of these visits.
For further information call E. Dotson Wilson, Chief Clerk of the Assembly, William E. Behnk, LIS Coordinator, or Charlotte Luallin, Applications Development Section Manager.
For more information about ASLCS, write or call:
Joan Barilla
National Conference of State Legislatures
7700 East First Place
Denver, CO 80230
Phone: 303/856-1349
FAX: 303/364-7800
E-mail: joan.barilla@ncsl.org
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