First off, we must start with apologies. Michael spent week 43 on a much needed vacation. This time in North Kent rather than in his typical haunt of St Lucia. Weeknotes wise, this means we’ve skipped a week. And memory wise, Michael remains confused about what went on before his vacation and what’s transpired since. Though he is reaching an age where repetition becomes second nature, so it’s possible you won’t notice much difference. We’re reasonably confident he’s not medically senile, and should he ever start a conversation with, ‘when I was at the BBC’ we find it’s best to give him a bag of Murray Mints and wait for it to wear off. Anyway, some things definitely did happen this week. But they’re all a little half finished. So we don’t have much to point you at. A quick summary, then, in the form of bullet points:
Following on from conversations with Journal Office Eve, Librarian Jayne and Michael have added more fine fettling to the procedure that may or may not be a procedure and which we definitely can’t talk about yet. If ever. Off the back of that, Jayne has also removed preclusions from both withdrawal and the invocation of section 22 from the main CRaG treaty procedure. Committees never being precluded by such minor matters, sayeth Eve.
Librarians Jayne and Claire and computational ‘expert’ Michael continue to make progress on our public bill procedure map. House of Commons first reading is now mapped and inside the machines. For what that’s worth. There’s really not an awful lot of it. The skeleton procedure map for public bills - as opposed to the public procedure map for skeleton bills - has been tweaked to cope with more ways in which a bill may enter a House, or be inside a House, or leave a House. It’s now making slow progress on its way into the machines.
The week started with a rough plan to map the procedure for remedial orders as set out by Schedule 2 of the Human Rights Act 1988. That didn’t go too well. Our maps take the laying of an instrument - or at least its publication - to be the start point of a procedure. But it would appear that urgent orders might result in two layings within the same time period. So, at least in this case, it feels like the timing of the egg might be more important than its laying. More thought needed next week.
Librarians Anya and Jayne and their computational colleagues Ian and Michael met with TNA Catherine on Tuesday to chat about syncing both our Act data and our enabling Act data. A rough plan was hatched to update our somewhat patchy register of Acts via the medium of TNA’s shiny new linked data API. And Catherine promised to look into supplying a mapping from our statutory instruments to their enabling Acts. Which should save a great deal of librarian time. Conversation moved on to TNA’s plans to expose powers as first order objects and our desire to see likewise for duties. Especially those duties which may be toward Parliament.
On the subject of enabling Acts and delegated powers, Michael popped along to an event on delegated legislation organised by the Hansard Society. It is rare for Michael to do anything alone and walking into a room of well-dressed, important looking people took almost all his reserves of courage. It was an interesting discussion although he can’t, in all honesty, say he left the room feeling any great degree of positivity about… well, anything really. Spirits lifted a little in the local pub where he was joined by both Anya and Table Office Matt. Drink was taken but not much of the world put to rights.
The week saw not one but two workshops. The first on wrapping our heads around the reasons why a House membership might end, with a view to improving the strapline on Member pages. That one was attended by Anya, Anna, Phil and Michael. The second workshop was a little more abstract in nature, as an almost fully-fit first eleven of librarians - Anya, Jayne, Claire, Anna, Emily, Ned, Phil, Steve - got dragged along to a session on how team:librarian might reorientate work away from horizontal systems and toward more vertical services. A number of situations - or ‘scenarios’ as Michael likes to call them - were mapped out together with touchpoints into systems and current manuals. Young Robert and Michael have already began to explore how we might make new ‘what to do when…’ manuals that link down into our existing manuals where appropriate. The matter being made only slightly more difficult by SharePoint’s resistance to playing nicely with the web or with anything that might look remotely like a web standard.
More updates have been made to our swimlane-style diagram of written questions and answers in the House of Lords. This time based on feedback from Gatekeeper Sally. Unfortunately, it would appear our efforts are still not up to Sally’s exacting standards, there being additional feedback and more changes to make next week. Though at least the list of corrections is getting smaller. So that’s not nothing.
Wednesday saw a meeting with Anya, Edward, Silver and Michael to chat through proposed work on the Commons’ Library subject specialist directory. This is - for now - a PDF that gets sent out to Members and their staff as a sort of Yellow Pages for subject experts in the Library. A cross between LinkedIn and Guess Who. It signposts a range of things, from big themes such as housing, pensions and immigration, right the way through to more esoteric expertise in village greens. We had been looking to merely rationalise the subject expert taxonomy but this work appears to be expanding toward something more like ‘a single subject view of the Library’s inputs, outputs and workflows’. Which is quite a cool little project when you think about it.
Rush data tidies continue via the medium of Librarian Anna, as do James’s efforts to take what Anna has tidied and normalise it. We now have reference lists for: Member titles, genders, education levels, countries, types of schools, types of university, types of club, types of connection to local government and types of connections to other parliaments. Lovely stuff.
