As the clocks slip back and the nights lengthen, everything is running a little backwards in terms of both the week and the notes. For once we start at the end, with an update on our outreach and engagement strategy.
In-office office life kicked off on a Monday, which is unusual for us. This because Developer Jon did not make good on his threat of “dying of death”, deciding a holiday would be more appropriate. Quite surprisingly, for a semi-Northern lad, he chose London as his destination. Which is how Librarians Anya and Jayne, Delivery Manager Lydia and computational bag carrier Michael found themselves in Portcullis House ‘bright’ and early on a Monday morning, waiting for Jon and his friend Lily to clear security. Bags checked, they embarked on a whistlestop tour of the palace. Front of house was toured, backstage explored, lunch taken, two gift shops were visited, and parliamentary socks were purchased. Lovely to finally meet you Jon. And lovely to meet you, Lily. Do come back soon.
Monday was the first of two trips across Parliament Square this week, as Thursday marked the inaugural outing of the Parliamentary Pudding Club. The Club will meet monthly at one of Parliament’s purveyors of steamed puddings, to partake in both sponge and custard. This first outing of Pudding Club convened at Bellamy’s, where Librarians Anya, Ayesha, Emily, Jayne, Jason, Phil and Steve, Data Analyst Rachel and Keeper of the Pudding Spoon Michael, went face down in a very acceptable coconut and jam pudding. The Keeper would like to put on record his gratitude to Bellamy’s staff, who dealt with nine plaintive faces staring balefully at the two remaining puddings and half a jug of custard - 15 minutes before closing time - with aplomb, rustling up sufficient supplies in the blink of an eye. The temptation to create a pudding rating spreadsheet was naturally strong, but Pudding Club offers the opportunity to step outside of the daily drudgery. We didn’t think another information management task should come between us and our puddings.
Fresh from her groundbreaking tour of the Highlands and Islands - well, Edinburgh, let’s not get carried away - Librarian Susannah has announced she’s secured an agent, a manager and a recording contract, and is shortly to embark on her debut tour of Europe. Well, Brussels. Let’s not get carried away. All this off the back of her debut single, “How to plan for a general election and then not panic when one happens”. Godspeed, Librarian Susannah. Have a criminally strong beer on us.
Before pressing on, we should make our excuses. Not only did Developer Jon choose to head off on a seasonal city break, our Jianhan and Silver also chose October - of all months - for rest and recuperation. Now we are by no means ‘tech bros’. As far as we can recall, we’ve never asked anyone, ‘do you even code, bro?’. But a loss of developers makes development somewhat hard. Please don’t blame us for the lack of visible progress. Trust we’ve been paddling like ducks, under the surface.
If you tuned in last time out, you’ll know Librarian Jayne has roped in computational cabin lads Young Robert and Michael to cobble together some procedure tracking clickable pixels. Their intention had been to start with the nuts and bolts of procedural model infrastructure - routes, clocks, calculation styles and etc. Or the boring stuff, if you will. That changed on Wednesday morning when Jayne and Michael met Graeme for a reprise of earlier legislative consent motion chats.
Now that we’ve been allocated a couple of days of our Jianhan’s time - thanks Lydia - we believe we have everything in place to enter and store LCM data, with just enough about bills to contextualise what consent is being given to, or not, as the case may be. The remaining problems are twofold: knowing what is actually happening in the devolved legislatures, and serialising what gets captured into a reasonable set of pixels. Devolving access to our procedure editor application might be one way to solve the first problem. Providing a linked spreadsheet that’s procedure editor shaped might be another. Both are under active consideration.
Providing access to pixels has been made much easier by our procedure browser application, but that’s not going to help if it’s only serialising the boring stuff. For that reason, Jayne and Michael have taken a spanner to the Trello board; routes, clocks and calculation styles moving left; work packages - and their timelines - moving right. Goodbye, for now, boring stuff.
Elsewhere in procedure land, efforts continue to translate our procedure model into something Data Graphs is happy to swallow. This week, our beloved procedure model gained a new class of Procedure Collection, better to group remedial orders of the made and draft affirmative varieties. Those comments still need work.
With Developer Jon off exploring the sights and sounds of London town, visible progress on our new, old search application has been minimal. That said, we do have some good news. Again thanks to the wonder working of Delivery Manager Lydia, we’ll be working with Data Analyst Rachel for a wee while. Rachel immediately dived head first into the Harvester code - binders full of C# that haven’t been touched by human hand in the last 13 years. The Harvester code is what takes RDF Atom - yes, it really is that old - feeds from upstream procedural systems, applies a layer of business logic and pipes the results to the triplestore. The ‘business logic’ bit being something of a black box. We remain hopeful that if Rachel peers at it for long enough, she might be able to open that black box and reveal what’s inside. Rice and rye, perhaps.
Amongst their many other duties, our crack team of librarians manage the management of member information in the Members’ Names Information System. Or at least the Commons half of it. When team:MNIS was formed back in late 2021, we knew we were taking on database with a long, varied and not fully documented history. Like librarian moths to a flame, we committed to the 3Rs: review, renovate and write it down. In and around the day to day work of keeping things up to date and the mailbox under control. That work suffered something of a hiccup when the unexpectedly early general election caused an all hands on deck moment. For some months. That Librarians Anna and Emily were also pulled sideways to tidy and improve the data for our election results website didn’t help matters.
Finally on the far side of the general election, we found ourselves in the unenviable position of running two MNIS-themed Trello boards: one supposedly general election focussed but failing to stick to that remit, one, in theory, more general. Boss ‘brarian Anya placed her foot down with a firm hand, declaring there shall be but a single board. Minds turned to how we might combine them.
Luckily, before doing that, we’d managed to find the time to sit down with the MNIS database schema and highlight which bits concern us and which of those bits we consider tidy. The schema picture provided all the grouping clues we needed, the big bubbles now turned into what Young Robert might call ‘epics’, the ‘epics’ all added as columns to our new, clean Trello board. All cards from the two old boards have been decanted across and placed in the correct buckets. The old boards are now closed. Tidy!
Our new annotated MNIS schema picture can be found as a PDF or an SVG in everyone’s favourite GitHub repo. Why not print one out and pin it to your bedroom wall? Should your bedroom wall be large enough.
Two pieces of late breaking news over in indexing land, the first concerning a mammoth effort to check roughly 1,500 draft statutory instruments laid prior to the 57th Parliament. Or 2017 in old money. Some going back as far as 1984. All 1,500 have been checked, around 880 being found to have departed Parliament and subsequently been made. Made instruments have gained a made date and a reclassification. Links to pertinent proceedings have been added to both the “newly” made instruments and the remaining 748 that never made it past draft status. Top work from Librarian Emma there.
Work over in new, old search-land turned up 22 records having no assigned type. Which we didn’t think possible. Most appeared to be ministerial corrections but checking was required. So check Librarian Jayne did. Checking complete, a call went in to colleagues in the Computational Section and that call has now been answered, all 22 records finding new homes on correct shelves.
Our regular reader will be well aware of the time and effort Librarian Anna - in particular - has put into our army of Mastodon and Bluesky bot accounts. Imagine then our disappointment when Shedcode James got in touch to pass on the message that botsinspace - our chosen provider for Mastodon bottery - had announced its imminent closure. Or sunsetting, as Young Robert might say. Brilliant. Just brilliant.
If you’re a Mastodon user and a follower of any of our bot accounts, it’s perfectly possible they’ll stop working shortly before Christmas. Alternative options are being explored, James - a different James - kindly suggested he wouldn’t be averse to hosting. James - the first James - very kindly offered to up his donations to James - the second James - to help out. That said, both James - the different one - and James - another different one - suggested that Parliament hosting from its own domain would probably be for the best. If boss boss ‘brarian Bryn happens to be reading this, be aware this is us pulling our best puppy dog faces. How can anyone ignore that many Jameseses?
