More Comments On This

William Heath, with his usual incredibly high quality of suggestions mentioned that it might be a good idea to put the Varney report on UK Government on Government services to Citizens, and also the ID Cards Action plan up for comment.

One think about doing the id cards document is the amount of care that had been taken over layout and presentation; and the way that headers were used to break up text, seemingly to hide what was actually being said behind the heading. Compared to that document, the ISG report was a joy to convert - focussing on substance, not spin or style.

I wonder what will be worth doing next...

Merry Christmas

Some of the people behind mySociety have traditionally produced a "Christmas present for the world" - Directionless, hassle me.

There are many large documents published (Iraq Study Group, Dodgy Dossier, POWER Inquiry, Gowers Review) which would benefit from people being able to comment on particular paragraphs, rather than the document as a whole.

The Comment on POWER site took more work to create than is worthwhile for most documents; and it should be easier than that. So I built comment on this and populated it with the Iraq Study Group report as a proof of concept. The voodoo behind the scenes should make this easier for other stuff

Let's see what happens...

Why?

If you read this blog, you need to watch this 15min presentation about gapminder and data.

Talking to William a few weeks ago, he asked why I do what I do.

Not really having a good response, I blathered a bit, talking about basing decisions and processes on data not spin/ideology, and various other things which made some bit of sense, but didn't really hang together as a whole.

Hopefully, at some point, there will be a better answer, but for now, watch the presentation, as some of the reasons are shared; including the chimpanzees.

Whitehouse

principally a braindump so that when I remember that this is running, I can remember what I wanted it for in the first place.

whitehouse.thegovernmentsays.com is the Whitehouse Press Briefings put into the same format as the DowningStreetSays.com entries on TheGovernmentsays.com. Since the DSS posts have descriptive titles, the WH ones don't, the match should only be easy that way.

Scanning Word Documents

Each year, the "democracy.org.uk collective" usually meet in someone's house to meet, talk and work on stuff for a day or two. 2 years ago, they launched www.directionlessgov.com, a year ago, www.hassleme.co.uk was created on day 2. However, on day 1, we were looking at a different project which didn't actually go anywhere for reasons at the end of the tale. I wonder what we'll do this year...



The government publishes a lot of documents online. Most of those are PDFs, but there is a huge number of word documents also published.

What we did was fetched a huge swathe from random government departments (all the big ones, some of the smaller ones), along with every press release that www.thegovernmentsays.com every picked up.

This was somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 documents.

We then ran all of them through a program to look for those which had "Track Changes" turned on, and had a look at the changes that we found.

I think the number that we found was around 15 (it made it into double digits, but it wasn't by much). And many of those had track changes enabled, but no actual changes. Almost all of the rest had random layout or white space changes made. I think we found one which had a comment left in. It wasn't something funny.

In short, while it was a fun exercise, there was effectively nothing useful found, but something we could look at again in a few years to see if the standard has regressed.


While I was heavily involved, it wasn't just me; Francis Irving did the word document analysis, and the London Perl Mongers who were an invaluable source of ideas for doing bits of it.

"Why Politics Matters"

Why Politics Matters is a relatively new book (published over the summer) written by Gerry Stoker.

In it, he makes the argument, both strongly and well, that engagement in politics is a good thing and potentially what could and shouldn't change to make participation and engagement stronger and better. It's not a politics text book per se, but a book about civic engagement, with both Politics and politics as two aspects of that.

Jack Straw's recent bleatings against the rise of single issue politics in favour of party politics, and his arguments against Theyworkforyou.com seem to be the antithesis of this. It was interesting to hear Straw talk at an event in Manchester a few weeks back, and watch the reactions from the "Young Fabians" (and others, although it was a YF event) in the room. While there was agreement, there also seemed to be a sense of bemusement with what he was saying.

Gerry's argument pushes engagement as a good thing - "Politics matters because collective decisions matter" - but recognises that there are different types of politics, and that this can be considered a strength, not a weakness.

Hopefully the omission of any reference to anything done by mySociety and associated projects will be corrected in a future edition. From an email off the author, it seems that it was through lack of awareness of the developments that meant no reference was included.

In summary, it's a useful read that brings a lot of ideas together in a very readable manner - something suggestible to someone interested in why we/I do what we/I do as "further reading" with the added bonus of it being an academic text (albeit aimed at the general reader).