TheyWorkForYou.co.nz is closed for 2010
On 19 January 2010 the volunteer that runs TheyWorkForYou.co.nz announced his decision to cease updating the website during 2010.
TheyWorkForYou.co.nz was built to hold power to account by making it easier for you to monitor New Zealand Parliament’s activity. A raft of social tracking features had been planned in 2006. But the process of loading Hansard data from www.parliament.nz each week proved manually intensive, and consumed too much resource to allow new features to be developed.
After yesterday’s announcement the following question was asked by email:
I wonder whether it’s possible to drop the workload by fixing the encoding at the source: namely, to have the Hansard staff encode and upload the information in such a way that they don’t give you buggered up data. I know you’ve been talking to them, and these conversations must have happened. What’s the obstacle to making a smooth TWFYNZ data ingest?
As far as I can determine, the parliament does not have an internal software development team dedicated to their website. They commissioned the development of the software that produces the HTML version of Hansard from a third party.
For the most part their Hansard HTML is structured and imbued with symantic meaning. However it often contains erratic deviations that are inconsistent with the standard structure. These have to be manually corrected before they can be loaded into the TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, partly because the loading software was designed to prevent erroneous content from being allowed through to the public website.
If you are from parliament and are curious about the manual alterations I make, you should look at the commit messages on this respository of HTML from parliament.nz (click each commit message to see details of the change).
TheyWorkForYou.co.nz does report more serious errors (such as omissions) to the Parliament. Wonderful parliament staff do their best to fix these promptly, even though the software causing some of the problems was not written by them. However I’m left feeling that Parliament has neither the will or the financial resource to invest in improving the overall consistency of their Hansard HTML. At present parliament’s budget for new development appears to be going towards a project to make a video archive of parliament debates available to the public.
