On Friday, I took my first trip up to Albany for the first (fingers crossed) CapitolCamp, an unconference put together by the NY State Senate CIO and the NY State CIO.

A real range people and experiences were represented: private citizens who had a specific need, public servants who can see the process challenges of moving to bottom-up systems, librarians who are the faithful stewards of Senate data, a number of folks hoping to make sense of all the silly web app names being thrown their way, the geeks who spend all day on those apps.

This diversity was a challenge, but that’s why we all came together in the first place. This is a big responsibility of people who work and play on the Web: to work with public servants to understand the current process challenges and ways to address them.

TOPP got kudos at a few points, both for the community tools at Livable Streets and for converting the MTA Budget data into an open, mashable form.

More after the jump…