NUS draft new constitution

There was a proposal to replace the constitution of the UK's National Union of Students which didn't pass, but hasn't yet died (it's just resting...). I've put a copy up on CommentOnThis.com.

This isn't the current constitution, but a somewhat controversial proposal to replace it. I'll put the current one up if someone sends me a copy.

Comment on This in Minnesota, US

I got an email from someone at the Minnestoa Environment Protection Agency asking for a copy of the CommentOnThis code; and this is what they used it for internally on their intranet:

Islam in English Law

I've put the text of Rowan William's "Islam in English Law" lecture into commentOnThis.

www.commentonthis.com/islaminenglishlaw

Data Handling Procedures in Government: Interim Progress Report

The UK Government report "Data Handling Procedures in Government: Interim Progress Report" is now on CommentOnThis.com.

CommentOnThis:

A new document on CoT:
The Government Reply to the Fifth Report from the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Session 2006 - 2007. HL PAPER 165 — Personal Internet Security.

For why it matters, see the Light Blue Touchpaper blog at Cambridge

Government Response to the Power of Information Review

The Government Response to Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg's "Power of Information" review is now up on CommentOnThis.com

Power of Information

A commentable version of Tom Steinberg's "Power of Information" review is now up for your comments on on CommentOnThis.com

Extensions to CommentOnThis.com

Since I launched www.commentonthis.com in December, there have been a number of people who've asked about future expansions. Here are some initial thoughts on the directions it wont go, but which others may wish to take similar sites which I'd .

CoT does what it does - lets you comment on specific paragraphs of selected PDFs which we've put up. There are no immediate plans to expand it to commentsonthis.com to arbitrary documents. However, the process by which they are converted is pretty much document independent.

You take a PDF document, and run it through a text converter. Then it gets edited to clean up page footers/headers and other bits, and add in markup for section headers. Then it gets processed again which puts it into the database for comment. While the process is a pain in the neck for most documents, it's not particularly complicated.

While, currently, the whole thing is done through scripts and editing is done via a text editor, there's no reason it can't be done through scripts and a wiki, hence be done in the browser.

Which means, that we can easily get to a point where people can publish arbitrary documents, and have them be commentable and linkable at a relatively fine granularity. There would need to be various proceedures put in to avoid spam, but the addition of some security and hooks for anonymity (https to hide what you're looking at, and serverside hooks to avoid some traffic analysis attacks, plus whatever you need to do to be tor, or anything else, friendly).

For various reasons, you often do not want the original documents to be fully wikied, but want them to be commentable and linkable down to the paragraph level.

However, if you then automate the process, such that you can put up and start cross linking a set of documents and running tasks over them.

As another possible application, do we know any projects which will start getting documents in which people deem to have value and which may be usefully commented on and linked to? Yes, we do.

Does anyone want to run with this idea? I've not got the time to build it, but I'm happy to help.

Transformational Government: Annual Report 2006

The transformational Government report is now up on CommentOnThis.com - after a manic job of cut and paste (with some retyping thrown into the mix as well).

Seems reasonable on a very fast read (as I was going through it doing markup).

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...