Rad and colleagues got back late on Friday to say they’d fixed the slight bug we’d identified with the Standing Order data. So Michael’s computer spent most of the weekend normalising a spreadsheet into a relational database. Robert and Michael checked the website on Monday and it was indeed fixed. Thanks Rad.
On Tuesday, Anya, Robert and Michael met Adam, an associate professor from Swansea University. No sense of snobbishness, but they pretty much only hang out with professors these days. They exhausted a whiteboard in explaining the procedure modelling work and how it came about and how they think it can be used. More in the way of collaboration is hoped for here.
Later that day, Librarian Jayne met Luanne Middleton, the new Clerk of the JCSI, SCSI and ESIC, to explain the work behind the Statutory Instrument Service and Treaty Tracker. The meeting came about when Librarian Jayne queried the absence of JCSI consideration for some instruments. Luanne was happy with what she saw and asked whether we’d be able to provide queries in order to help her produce statistics reports for Members. Jayne, rather naively, nodded yes and is now on a SPARQL journey to do just that. For example all proposed negative statutory instruments and their following statutory instruments. The meeting also produced some procedural questions such as: why the JCSI sometimes considers Commons only instruments, what happens to consideration when an SI is revoked during its objection period, and why committee consideration is weird for Northern Ireland statutory rules.
Also on Tuesday, Librarian Jayne and Michael met Journal Office Jane to talk about different types of delegated legislation, how they map to our four currently modelled procedures and which other procedures we might need to map. They’ve started to draw up the results although Church of England measures are still something of a mystery. The map has been passed back to Jane for comment.
And also on Tuesday, librarians Jayne and Anya and computational experts Robert and Michael got together to review our Standing Orders application. Some presentational issues were fixed which hopefully improve things.
Jayne and Michael attempted to put in a solid couple of hours editing procedure maps but Jayne’s cold forced an early bath. Nonetheless, they did manage to finish off adding preclusion routes between assorted House of Lords EU sub-committees in the treaty procedure. Which looks a mess, but tightens up the logic. They now await the Lords allocating to two sub-committees. At which point they’ll strip all this back out.