Understanding Nothing

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.

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…

I think I have found a new entrant for the Worst Software Ever™ awards: the Belfast City Council on-line minutes system.

There are at least three versions of this on-line. After talking with a consultant for the Corporate Applications Team I now know that two of these versions are obsolete. However, if you were to search in Google for, say, “Belfast City Council minutes”, those are the ones you will find. The “true” system is one you get if you click on the “Minutes” link from the main City Council website.

This new system doesn’t suffer from all the same faults as the old system (e.g. file name paths being returned from the search as \ rather than /, making the documents inaccessible), but still suffers from most of them. The worst is that you can’t actually browse the minutes in any sensible manner – you can only search them. This requires knowing what you’re actually looking for, which is no use to me, as I’m just wanting to see what the Council is up to generally, rather than on anything specific. To make any serious use of the system you also need to know that Council meetings happen in a three level hierarchy:

The main monthly council meeting mostly just accepts (or rejects) minutes from the Committees (Client Services, Contract Services, Development, Health & Environmental Services, Policy & Resources, and Town Planning). Most of those, in turn, do likewise for their Sub-Committees (for example Policy and Resources has committees for Drug Misuse, Finance/Admin/IS, Members, Personnel, and Policy & Performance Review). So if you want to read about what the council is actually doing, you need to find the relevant sub-committee minutes.

Of course these committees and subcommittees have changed over time as well, so searching in “Finance, Administration and Information Systems” will only take you back to 1997. In 1996/97 it was Finance & Admin (with a separate Information Systems sub-committee), and until 1995 it was just Admin.

The new system seems to have tried to make this process easier by making you specify whether the Committee Status is CURRENT or HISTORIC, but really that doesn’t help. (Particularly as you can only find out that those are the options by reading the 5 page User Guide PDF, or by clicking a button which eventually pops up a window asking you to select from those in a very clumsy way).

Of course, wrestling with the search is only the first problem. When you find an interesting set of minutes then you have to find a way to read them. There are little check-boxes beside all the results, but it’s not exactly obvious what they’re for. Clicking on the little “view” icon has an annoying habit of crashing Firefox, so the download link is probably what you want – assuming you can actually read Microsoft Word documents. If you can’t read Word, you’ll need to perservere with the “view”, which does a reasonable job of converting the Word document, although it doesn’t really like any councillor’s name containing a fada.

When you finally have a set of minutes to read, you’ll probably then discover that they’re not that useful unless you can also find all the referenced committee and sub-committee minutes, and probably several sets of historic minutes as well. Which, of course, means wrestling with the search system some more. And then there are lots of references to various Standing Orders and the like which probably won’t make a lot of sense to you. And of course if you want to know the party affiliations of all the people voting against certain proposals and the like you’ll need to go look those up somewhere else too. The information is all available of course – we are now living in a post-FOI country. But it’s not easy to find or make sense of.

So, I did what any self-respecting new-technology-aware Freedom-of-Information-loving geek would do, and created a wiki for it.

Please welcome http://nigov.tmtm.com/. I’ve populated it with some basic information on Belfast City Council, its members, departments, committees etc., and added all the 2005 minutes I can find. The system seems to only have minutes up to the May election, but that’s still over 100 sets of minutes.

They’re all just cut’n'paste from Word for now, and need a lot of tidying and cross-linking, but it’s a useful start.

Anyone who wants to help out please join in.

Maybe in a few years time, when it comes time to vote, people will actually be able to look at what the candidates have actually done during their time in office. And for those few people in Northern Ireland who don’t just vote along politico-religious lines, this might actually be useful!

Recently I received my copy of the Spring 2005 “City Matters”, the magazine distributed by Belfast City Council to every home in the area.

There are several articles in it about the new anti-litter campaigns around Belfast. Apparently since last April 746 fixed penalty notices have been issued for littering, and they’ve just employed another litter warden and two more enforcement officers (bringing the total to 3 wardens and 6 EOs). Apparently 122 individuals have also been prosecuted in the courts for this.

It currently costs almost 10m a year to have the streets of Belfast cleaned, which is much higher than similar cities across the UK.
Currently all money raised through fines is paid to the Department of the Environment, but there is legislation planned for the summer which will allow the concil to reinvest this money in making Belfast a cleaner city.

There has also been a major anti-litter advertising campaign, “Don’t drop it, stop it!”. This has recently been independently evaluated, and, according to “City Matters”, has successfully got the message across to people, with 54% remembering the campaign without any prompting and 86% after prompting. Apparently “more than half of the people asked understood that our message was to ‘stop littering’”.

In my world, if nearly half of the people who’ve seen your ad don’t realise that it’s trying to get you to stop littering, then it’s actually a colossal failure. But “City Matters” doesn’t go into any great detail about this evaluation, so I’ve wrtten to the City Council to get a copy of the results.