In your robots.txt, make sure that as well as the traditional
Disallow: /wiki/index.php?
you also include
Disallow: /wiki/Special:Random
Otherwise you’ll get some rather confused visitors…
Yesterday evening, whilst processing the minutes of the Belfast City Council Policy and Resources Committee from 18 March 2005, I noticed that they referred to a report into the Council’s strategic approach to communications – including a review of the Council’s corporate identity, the development of the website as a key communications tool and a review of the Council’s approach to graphic design, advertising, publications and leaflets. This sounded interesting, but, unlike most reports presented to the committees, this one wasn’t included with the minutes. So, at about 5:30 yesterday evening, I sent off a Freedom of Information request for it.
At about 10:30 this morning, I received a copy of it in email! This is probably the fastest result of a FoI request I’ve had yet!
If anyone else finds it interesting, I’ve added the report to the nigov wiki.
The section on the City Council website is a little bland:
Belfast City Council’s website needs to be properly resourced and positioned so that it plays its part in disseminating the council’s key messages. It also needs developed in terms of providing information and, even more importantly, services to ratepayers. The website is vital to the council’s reputation not only at home but overseas. A proposal is going before P&R to properly resource this operation and it needs to work closely or as part of Corporate Communications to ensure opportunities are maximised.
I’ve sent a follow-up request for the proposal.
Since Tuesday of this week I’ve been watching the effects of Google spidering the nigov wiki. On Tuesday, there were about 8 pages indexed. On Wednesday it was around 80. By last night there were 800.
As I said earlier, I expected this promotion of the Belfast City Council minutes to first class internet citizens to be useful. But I wasn’t expecting quite so much search engine traffic quite so soon.
The bulk of the minutes have only been available from google searches for about 24 hours. And I’ve already had click-throughs from the following searches:
* alex maskey
* allotment dundonald
* anti-litter campaign aims and objectives
* belfast city airport ministerial statement
* belfast city council tourism dept
* business improvement district proposals in northern ireland
* canal belfast
* continental market belfast city hall
* councillor m browne + economic sub committee
* david mach belfast city hall
* development control in northern ireland on hot food bars
* difficulties associated with outdoor concerts
* drinking on the street belfast city council
* fixed penalty fines issued by belfast city council
* floral hall belfast
* leading ladies from belfast
* lynch cranmore gardens
* north belfast council dumps
* oasis retail services
* pestle analysis for belfast
* place and belfast and chairman and architect
* playground funding northern ireland
* sculpture david mach belfast
* shankill road activities
* sprucefield phase 2
* studio space belfast
* successful tender for the provision of agency workers
* tender for the provision of agency workers
* titanic quarter belfast expenditure
* ulster hall
* ulster senior waterfront hall boxing
* waterfront hall
* waterfront hall board
* waterfront hall studio hire charges
* waterworks belfast
* who is councillor tom hartley
(As well as the usual ragbag of bizarre terms that seem completely unrelated to anything).
Now, it’s likely that the information that many of these people wanted was available elsewhere. But that amount of clickthroughs in 24 hours certainly implies that it’s not enough for things like council minutes to just be “available” online. Locking them away behind a complex interface makes them all but invisible to the determined searcher. Most government tender documents these days talk about the “three clicks rule”, where all content needs to be available within 3 clicks of the home page. Perhaps someone should introduce them to the “one search rule” – if your content isn’t available within 1 click of a google search, it may as well not exist.
Back in 2002, Councillor Hartley visited the Cemetery Records stored in the basement of Belfast City Hall, and reported to the Parks and Amenities Sub-Committee that he believed that the humidity and temperature in the basement was too high for storing such important historical documents. He suggested that this needed examined, and that consideration be given to moving them to a database instead.
Of course the official response was that after careful examination, the civil servants couldn’t see any problem with the current situation, but they would certainly produce a report on this.
Now maybe it’s just my inability to use the council minutes system, but I’ve been unable to find this report being brought back to the sub-committee.
Instead, the only further information I can find on cemetery records is the meeting of February 2005, when this time /several/ members raise the issue.
This time, though, they’re more sympathetic to the civil servants who do such a wonderful job carrying out their duties in such terrible conditions. And, this time, the sub-committee decides that something needs to be done as “a matter of urgency” – although the main thing they ask for is more space. The issue of the computerised records (or the possible destruction of all the records due to excess humidity) isn’t raised by the Councillors, although it is reported that a proposal will be made that these records be included in the Information Age Government Programme of Activities for the Council.
I don’t know if this was considered back in 2002 and it was decided not to go ahead, or whether this idea just vanished into the ether somewhere. But, there really isn’t much excuse for making people dig through paper records these days. So, I’ve made a Freedom of Information request for the report that the Head of Parks and Amenities promised to produce back in 2002. Belfast City Council have been very good at responding to my FoI requests to date, and much quicker than the main government departments, so hopefully I’ll have something more to report soon.
Joel has posted the initial draft of his Management Training Reading List, with 75 “must read” books on general business, software management, and corporate biography.
I think I’ve read 42 of the 75, and some of the others certainly look like I should read them. But I’m not going to aim for the 75 – I have no real interest in reading a book on Subversion, for example!
The inclusion of a Corporate Biography section is interesting, as these are generally underrated amongst the tiny subset of geeks who actually read business books. And although Joel claims these are “every worthwhile history of a software/computer company that we can find”, he also includes the history of Ben and Jerrys! I’m not entirely sure why this one is there. It’s certainly an interesting story, but if you’re going to step outside the technology sphere, then there are lots of other interesting choices.
Anyway, here are 25 books he’s missed to round it up to neat 100:
(Disclaimer, most of this is from memory, and from my bookshelves at home. A lot of my books are in the office, so I’ve probably forgot a lot of obvious things!)
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On 4th October 2005, I made a Freedom of Information request in relation to DETI’s “Production of an E-Business Strategy” consultancy award to Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in December 2000. As part of my request I asked for copies of the unsuccessful tender submissions. This request was passed to the Central Procurement Directorate, who declined my request under the Section 41″Information provided in Confidence” exemption, due to a confidentiality clause in the Terms and Conditions of Contract.
As you are no doubt aware, the guidance on this issue from the Information Commissioner, particularly in the documents on “Public Sector Contracts”, and “Awareness Guidance No 2: Information provided in confidence”, states clearly that a public authority cannot contract out of its responsibilities under the Act and unless information is covered by a specific exemption it must be released if requested.
In relation to a Section 41 exemption, the guidance states that the authority must be satisfied that an actual obligation of confidence exists, and that there is no veto given to third parties who merely object to disclosure. In addition the information withheld must not be trivial or readily available by other means.
I would suggest that even if some portions of the documents in question might indeed have this necessary “quality of confidence”, the majority would not, and that suitably redacted versions could be provided.
I would further argue that it is in the public interest test to release this information. This contract was highlighted as “Case Study G” in the Northern Ireland Audit Office’s report into the use of consultants by the Northern Ireland Civil Service, where it was noted that due to substantial changes to the original specification, and a number of extensions to the project, the cost rose from the original £30,000 to a total of £183,000. It would certainly be in the public interest to discover whether any of this remarkable over-spend was due to issues that should have been ascertained at an earlier stage, and particularly whether any of the unsuccessful tenders had raised any of these issues.
I would therefore ask that you conduct a formal review of the refusal to release these tender submissions. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Dear Mr Bowden
I refer to your E-Mail dated 13 November 2005 in which you requested information regarding an exhumation to be carried out in the City Cemetery as per the minutes of the Parks and Amenities Sub-Committee of 11 October 2005.
Having sought advice from the Police Service Northern Ireland and BCC Legal Services I can inform you that we are not in a position to release the information requested as the exhumation is a part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
This morning I received a letter from the Central Procurement Directorate in relation to one of my Freedom of Information requests. When I requested information on the DETI “Production of an E-Business Strategy” contract (contract price £30k, actual spend £183k), one of the things I asked for was the unsuccessful tenders. This was passed to the CPD, who are withholding the information due to confidentiality clauses:
I am writing to advise that the Department has decided not to disclose the information you requested on 4 October 2005.
Your request to be provided with copies of the unsuccessful tender submissions in respect of the contract for the ‘Production of an E-Business Strategy’ commissioned by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment has been treated as a Freedom of Information request and processed accordingly. However, I would advise that the Terms and Conditions of Contract’ contain a confidentiality clause to which all suppliers have signed up.
The confidentiality clause states that each party will treat all information obtained from the other party in connection with the contract as confidential and that none of this information can be disclosed without the prior written consent of the other party.
Section 41 of the Freedom of Information Act (Information provided in Confidence) states that where a person who holds information is under a duty to keep that information confidential there will be a breach of confidence if that person makes an unauthorised disclosure of that information.Accordingly, Central Procurement Directorate (CPD) has approached the unsuccessful tenderers to seek their consent to disclosure of the requested information. All have indicated that they do not wish their tender documents to be released as the information contained therein relates to their innovative/creative approach to undertaking the requirement. Consequently CPD has taken the decision not to release the information sought by you.
You have the right to request a formal review by the Department in respect of this decision and if you wish to do so, please write to the Departmental FOI Appeals Manager, Information Management Unit, 1st Floor Rosepark Annex, Upper Newtownards Road, Belfast, BT4 3NR.
If after such an internal review you are still unhappy with the response, you have the right to appeal to the Information Commissioner at Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, CHESHIRE SK9 5AF, who will undertake an independent review.
If you have any queries about this letter, please contact me. Please remember to quote the reference number above in any future communications.
As far as I can remember the Information Commissoner provided guidance for just this sort of thing, which states that blanket confidentiality clauses in public sector contracts are a Bad Thing(tm). Now I need to go do some research …
It seems that someone was actually considering staging “Jerry Springer: The Opera” at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.
It is, of course, possible that they were figuring that having the DUP et al picket the production, with all the accompanying publicity, would be a good thing, allowing them to slash their marketing budget by 90%, and that this was actually a well thought out proposal. But if so they overlooked one rather important fact. Belfast Waterfront Hall is actually operated by Belfast City Council, rather than the private sector, so the Council has to approve everything that happens there.
And, as one might expect, they refused, “in the light of the potential of the production to cause grave offence to a considerable number of the citizens of Belfast”.
I’ll leave the social commentary to one side, and instead focus on one other major benefit to having the minutes in a wiki that I missed in my earlier post. The “official” minutes, whilst theoretically available on-line, are very far from easy to link to. They’re hidden behind a log-in (it may be one which automatically logs you in without you really knowing about it, but it still has an annoying habit of logging you out when you idle to long, and forcing you to “log in” again), a clumsy search engine, and are in Microsoft Word format, and although the search engine can display these as HTML, it’s all controlled via a JavaScript interface which makes it pretty much impossible to link to directly.
On the wiki the minutes become first class internet citizens.
Maybe in time the official minutes system will allow for this, but given the difficulties the Council appears to have with internet technology, I’m not expecting this any time soon.
James Stewart picks up on my rant about Belfast City Council’s minutes system with lament on e-Government in general.
He makes the interesting comment that:
Properly modelling government structures is a complex business, and my experience so far that it’s a lot of work to build the critical mass required to make a wiki work in a context like this. But given the service the council provides, it won’t take much to shame them, and it’ll be interesting to see how the project develops.
This is, of course, true, but at this point I’m not really expecting this to build up any sort of critical mass. In my experience, very few people in Nothern Ireland are sufficiently interested in what local government actually does. I don’t need to fund a focus group to realise that the size of the interesection of that small group with the also rather tiny group of people who are likely to contribute to a wiki is going to be very close to zero.
However, putting the content on such a wiki does still have some benefits.
Firstly, it helps me keep aware of what the Council is up to. By adding pressure to myself to spend 15 minutes a day doing something on the wiki, just to keep it ticking over, I’m making sure I’m paying attention to what’s going on. Without the wiki my good intentions here are more likely to get swallowed by all the other things I’m meant to be doing every day.
Secondly, the content will get picked up by Google. Currently the minutes, although theoretically public, are so well hidden behind a complex search tool that in practice they’re invisible to the search engines. By breaking them out of this constraint, it’s more likely that someone else will be able to find what they’re looking for.
Thirdly, by making them part of a wiki, it allows others to comment on them or help tidy them up, by making relevant cross-links. I’m not really expecting this to happen much, but it’s better to have the option open than not.
Lastly, it provides a framework for anyone else in NI who’s interested in this to do likewise without needing to have the technical ability to set up a wiki. If someone wanted to put, say, Carrickfergus Borough Council minutes online too, the barrier to doing so is now much lower. Again, I’m not really expecting this to happen any time soon, but again, it’s better that the ability is there.
Of course, in an ideal world, lots of people would find this immensely fascinating, and we’d have a steady stream of contributors, properly cross-referencing and cross-checking everything, and helping provide the checks and balances necessary for good government. But this is, after all, Northern Ireland…
