It was a week of bits. And indeed bobs. There were what one might call two grand narratives - at least by the standards of these notes - but neither were things we can talk about. So, to save everyone’s time - not least ours - this week’s notes arrive as bullet points:
Our Jianhan has continued on his quest to rewrite young Robert and Michael’s procedure parsing code into something more supportable. Progress was made and it now parses every route in a procedure. We had had an issue with the identification of untraversable routes with business steps being declared as things that should not now happen being somewhat overpopulated. Untraversable routes happen when bits of procedure that were once true get turned off. At which point a librarian adds an end date to a route. Jianhan’s latest code only declares steps pertaining to English Votes for English Laws as being not now possible. Which, given EVEL is now gone to standing order heaven, appears to be perfectly correct. He’s even made a start on visualisations arising from the parsing of a work package. More testing and some pixel polishing still being required.
Jianhan’s parsing code turned up one place where the logic in our procedure maps could have been tighter, our draft negative statutory instrument procedure allowing for withdrawal long after all the sand had run through the egg timer. Librarian Jayne and Michael spent a small part of Monday morning tightening procedural nuts with librarian spanners. So that is now fixed.
Young James has started the long slow slog through normalising our Rush database. This to avoid inadvertent typos from messing up our reference data. Librarian Anna and Michael tested the first of these and found Member title normalisation had gone exactly to plan. Unfortunately, they also found a small bug whereby deleting a record with another record attached caused the application to crash with a none too friendly error message. Which James has now fixed. More testing has been pencilled in for next week.
Still with James, it would appear that our last couple of bugs with the new peerage website are now quashed. New data from David permitting, we should be ready to go live shortly.
Anya, Jayne, Claire and Michael were fortunate to be joined by both Graeme and Richard for more public bill procedure mapping. The first things we needed to work out were ‘when is a bill in a House’ and ‘when has a bill left a House’. This in order to determine when a bill can enter a House. Early sketches had exhibited all kinds of complications around carry over motions and the invocation of the Parliament Act. Complications that became unnecessary when Graeme pointed out the ‘same’ bill in a new session is in fact a different bill. Which reduced six square foot of whiteboard to about one. We had hoped to spend some time decanting our new found knowledge into maps but then events rather got in the way. Time was found to redraw our bill ontology, adding a couple of new classes to link a bill in one session to the ‘same’ bill in a preceding session. Comments to follow shortly.
In other ontological news, we have started to comment our shiny, new geographic area model. Although, the two properties we’re hoping will describe area containment still lack explanation. Writing those should be fun…
And in other whiteboard news, Anya and Michael spent a very pleasant Friday morning with Joe and Nodar sketching out the system design for questions and answers. This is intended to live alongside the House of Lords question and answer workflow modelling we managed to extract from the considerable brain of Table Office Matt. Thanks to all concerned. Again, what we learnt has not yet made the journey from whiteboard to pixels. Next week looks likely to be a documenting week.
And finally, with help with House of Lords Anna and Kirsty, we have once again revised our membership transubstantiation diagram. It is intended to show the types of seats that exist - or have existed - and how Members might move between them. Lovely stuff.