Disruptive Proactivity

One of the nice things about the new HTML5 committee hearing player for Parliament, is the audio only feed is now an MP3, which is rather convenient. The last annoying step is remembering to download the relevant files to listen to, which podcast players are rather good at doing automatically.

So here is a list of all (currently meeting) committees of Parliament, with each link being to a podcast of their sessions. You can put that into your podcast players and listen along easily enough.

As for why you’d do this, let me introduce you to the player Overcast, and it’s very nice feature: smart speed, which makes committee hearings go a lot faster…

As an aside, the PMQs podcast is now run by Parliament rather than DowningStreetSays.com – thanks to the Parliamentary Digital Service for taking it over.

(The code code that generates the podcasts is on github if anyone wants to add witnesses, inquiry feeds, or take the whole thing over and make it look pretty as a service to the public (PDS?). I might come back to it over xmas – if it does get taken over, that would probably be a good thing).

Last Tuesday, I went along to the Science and Technology committee’s hearing on the IP Bill (see endnote for why). There were some good questions.

Given my past work on the draft Communications Data Bill, there are two areas which came up where this bill is substantively different, in a way that is probably interesting. Those areas are encryption and IPv6. There are other areas of interest, such as the filter, which is as bad an idea now as it was then. I’m sure Lord Haw Haw of Berriew will be on TV shortly to explain why, despite the agencies getting “no new powers” in the bill, it should be passed immediately for their benefit.

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