KLISS is alive and so am I

Well, I have been offline since XMas as a result of KLISS roll-out but I'm finally coming up for air.

For a whole bunch of very good reasons late last year, we added an internet facing front end to the KLISS system launch this year (in time for the 2011-12 legislative session).

KLISS phase 1 was mostly about the complex back-office functions of the legislature. In particular, replacing a very labor intensive, paper based bill processing system that involved scissors and colored pencils and glue sticks. (See the "flagged bill" in this short video).

Although adding a front-end to all of the new back-end machinery (circa 130 virtual machines of integrated back-office functions) added significantly to Propylon's coffee intake, we have made it through a very challenging timescale. The KLISS Internet-facing website is http://kslegislature.org.

We still have a lot of work to do to expose the power of the back-office systems on the website. The KLISS website truly is just the foyer into the vast factory complex where the real legislative content work takes place. It is in that behind-the-scenes factory that most of KLISS lives.

Over the next while I hope to blog more about how it all works under the hood and about plans for the future of KLISS. Now that we have the critical eDemocracy back-office platform in place, the sky is the limit on what we can do in information provision and services to legislators and the public.

I am very much looking forward to being a part of that.