At some point over the last couple of weeks, your regular correspondents found themselves in the unfamiliar situtation of partaking a post-work drink. Or two. It was one of those three-nights-in-one kinda sessions where one set of friends leave and another set arrive to take their place. So pretty brutal to be honest. As we waved farewell and thanks to Terence, we were joined by a couple of House of Lords colleagues, amongst them House of Lords Katya. Imagine our delight when the conversation turned to these very weeknotes and Katya announced herself to be a big fan. She expanded on her point to the table at large. “They’re about really boring stuff,” she explained, “but they’re occasionally quite funny.” Which is exactly the kind of feedback we’ve been looking for. If you have ideas on more boring things we could cover - preferably connected to battling Conway’s Law at the ontological intersection of parliamentary procedure and computers - or a decent line in self-deprecating jokes, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
This week, our much coveted Librarian of the Week Trophy goes to Librarian Ayehsa. Not for her information management skills - which are, of course, excellent - but instead for her unstinting efforts to inject a little organisation into proceedings. Not an easy task, akin to herding kittens perhaps. Some context may be required. Let’s try to inject some.
A wee while back - wee while being Librarian Anya’s shorthand for “we can’t remember when” - our crack team of librarians packed up their pens, pencils and thimblettes, and left Tothill Street for pastures new. The new pastures being a new office - or ‘co-working and ideation space’ as Young Robert might say - a couple of hundred yards closer to the Two Chairmen. Clearly a factor taken into consideration by the facilities team. Our current accommodation is a huge improvement on what we had, the views from our roof terrace being simply to die for. That said, and we’re certainly not ones to complain, the interior decor has that post-industrial pastiche vibe popular in Mancunian cafe bars around the turn of the century. Muted greys and exposed air-conditioning ducts, if you get our drift.
Just as Morrissey challenged the Haçienda’s industrial design by turning up with a bunch of gladdies, our crack team of librarians decided the place needed softening and brightening. Budgets being far from unlimited, they decided to go with bunting and balloons. And very jolly it was too.
Unfortunately, your modern balloon does not have the staying power of those of childhood memory. Dwindling turned into withering and eventually into perishing, some of our poor balloons taking on the appearance of abandoned prophylactics. Pretty depressing. This is where Librarian Ayesha stepped in. She did the research, chose the materials, organised the whip round and placed the order. This time, we’ve gone with a mix of better quality balloons and a multi-coloured assortment of honeycomb pompoms.
Whilst Librarians Anya, Jayne and Phil, together with computational lap-dog Michael, hobnobbed - for which read, wall-flowered - with the great and good at the Study of Parliament Group’s birthday party - more of which later - Ayesha set about organising the decoration party. She struck lucky, the timing coinciding with Librarian Anna being in the office. Perhaps the only one of us that can actually reach the ceiling. Data analyst Rachel and Delivery manager Lydia were also on hand, presumably making a pompom deployment graph or some such.
Not only this, Librarian Ayesha has also organised our Christmas dinner outing. For those interested, we’ll be enjoying a starter of cheese, followed by a main course of cheese, with some cheese to finish. We’d all like to thank Ayesha for making our office look splendid and helping to fill our bellies. Thanks Ayesha. Well deserving of LotW.
It’s been a wee while since we last stuck our teeth into a serious bit of procedural cartography, though our crack team of librarians remain on duty and our procedure maps continue to flex as Parliament flexes. This week saw the addition of two new steps - and accompanying logic - to our treaty procedure map. The first change came at the behest of the International Agreements Committee and led to a new step describing a request for an extension to scrutiny period A for the UK-Mauritius agreement concerning the Chagos Archipelago. The second new step describes correspondence being published by the Justice Committee and has seen its first appearance on the Agreement, done at London on 14 June 2023, between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Swiss Confederation on Recognition of Professional Qualifications. Occasionally, one has to step back and admire the sheer length of treaty titles.
Elsewhere in procedure tracking adjacent news, the National Audit Office got in touch to ask if our beloved egg timer is updated and indeed supported. It appears they’d like to use the House of Commons recess dates section to support some of their internal reporting. Unexpected use cases are always nice, confirming our suspicion that user needs are emergent from usage. Librarian Jayne was delighted to confirm that the beloved egg timer is indeed both supported and regularly updated. It is fair to say, it will soon be even better supported as Shedcode James steps in to lend a more professional hand.
Other procedure tracking news has been less good, a single meeting about whether two lines on a diagram should actually be a crow’s foot unexpectedly exploding into a whole slew of other meetings and a whole bunch of work. Librarian Anya got dragged in. Librarian Ned got dragged in. Librarian Silver got dragged in. A conclusion was finally reached and the decision taken that what we had been calling an event was in fact a business item, an event wrapping one or more business items and a business item only ever forming part of one work package. We’re all glad we’ve cleared that up. One has to admit, House of Lords Katya definitely has a point. Alas, we can only work with the material we’re given, and the combination of parliamentary procedure and the semantic web is a pretty tough gig.
The upshot is that Silver has been placed on standby, our efforts to port procedure editor to Data Graphs have been put on the back burner and we’re once again back to editing our procedure-related models before progress can continue. Sometimes, one has to slow down to speed up. Is our excuse.
The other upshot of the “one line or a crow’s foot” debate was an almost complete rewrite of our still gestating browsable procedure space. Rewrite aside, progress continues to be made, Librarian Jayne and Michael finding the time to fill out most of the views nested under /procedures. Not nothing.
In better news, Librarian Jayne has identified a number of measures to mitigate the feared collapse of our existing procedure editing application and our Jianhan has taken time out of his busy schedule to implement them. No data being lost in the process. Excellent work, as ever.
Elsewhere, progress on our new and much improved parliamentary search application continues to be made, this week seeing the improbably named European material produced by EU institutions reach the happy pile. Type labels for all content types are now also considered sorted. Except for Commons and Lords library briefings where a decision has been taken to prefer categories over subtypes. Your correspondent knows not why, but it’s best not to question. A new fallback template has also been introduced to mop up the odd occasion on which content arrives lacking any and all type information. This is not a thing that should happen, but, computers being computers, it’s not unknown. Early day motion object page design has been tidied, the introductory sentence now only listing the primary sponsor / tabling member, all other sponsors being present in the further details box.
Developer Jon has also been busy adding Claw functionality to our search result pages. The Claw being a bit of Javascript used by our crack team of librarians named after the shape your hand is forced to make in order to trigger it. Control + Option + D - at least if you’re on a Apple machine - for those interested. If your hand is able to make such a shape, it decorates the search result items with additional links and information necessary for the performance of excellent librarianship.
It would be remiss of your correspondent to skip over over his own comments in a meeting with Librarian Jayne and Developer Jon - Michael may have suggested that Jayne’s comments on Trello cards occasionally verge on the short novella. Actually, said Jon, they are the best, most descriptive cards I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Jayne may have blushed a little. Michael blushed more. That told him.
All of Jon’s efforts would prove pointless but for the excellent information management displayed by our crack team of librarians. After all, you can’t use code to fix data. To that end, our librarians have been busy attending to a few longstanding issues. One such issue was the absence of made dates on made statutory instruments. This because our old system - the one before our current old system - had no field for capturing such information, the only available slot being yet another note in the notes field. Undeterred Librarian Emma has trawled through four decades worth of SIs and decanted any made dates from the notes field into the made date field. Meanwhile, Librarian Tim has waded through decades of SIs, pinning down missing coming into force notes and dates. A proper labour of love and one we know our dearer reader will appreciate. Tim also encountered an unexpected stash of commencement orders. As things occurring outside the parliamentary domain, these were banished some time ago. Jayne alerted our Digital Service colleagues to the mysterious resurrection and sent them on their way again. The joys of the so-called “soft delete”.
Another couple of changes saw the useful separation of proposals to do something and actually doing something. First up being a new term covering proposals for a Regulatory Reform Order, which Librarian Ned noticed had been munged together with actual Regulatory Reform Orders. This is now fixed. A similar effort has been made for orders made under the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994 and proposals for such orders, which have also had new digital houses made, proposals and orders now being shelved correctly.
Glancing at Trello, very little appears to have changed over in psephological land. That said, a number of meetings have been convened, mostly on the subject of what we’d like to do and what we actually have the capacity to do. The gap appearing quite wide at this stage. That said, one change we all welcome has been made by Shedcode James, who’s been beavering away automating our election results database to Datasette pipeline. This has always been a somewhat manual process. In order to get from the Postgres database hosted on Heroku, you first need to download the thing, then convert it to SQLite, then upload it again. A process made more difficult by Michael’s machine flat out refusing to deal with Python, leaving Young Robert to pick up the slack. Via the judicious application of a GitHub action or two, James has now fully automated this process, freeing up Young Robert to be what managerial types - and indeed Robert himself - might describe as ‘more creative’. Let’s see how that goes.
James has also been busy helping Librarian Anna with normalising the Rush data. This week saw the unveiling of yet another normalised database table, this one describing the nature of an election across both successful and unsuccessful candidacies. Lovely.
Tracking changes in Cabinet members has never been too difficult. After all, they tend to make the news. They are also published in a timely fashion on gov.uk, though - if we’re allowed to make requests - not compounding two different job titles into one string would make all the difference here. Tracking changes to the shadow cabinet has always been a trickier proposition, there being no real official source of such announcements. This week, Librarian Phil reports he has made contact with the Conservative party, who have promised to keep us informed of any and all changes on an ongoing basis. Going forward, as Young Robert might add. So that’s another job now made much easier.
A member-related editorial decision has also been made over in Parliamentary Facts and Figures-land. Where possible, we always try to populate our spreadsheets with useful identifiers, many of which are sourced from our Members’ Names Information System. This is all fine and dandy for more modern members, but - back before 1980 - MNIS is patchy at best. To cope with that problem, we had been using identifiers from the Rush database. It has now been decided to prefer Wikidata identifiers over Rush, the former providing a point of triangulation back to Rush and beyond. All eased - indeed made possible - by Librarian Andrew’s excellent efforts in this area. Thanks Andrew.
If you tuned in last time out, you’ll know that the imminent closure of botsin.space left us in a mild state of panic about the future of our Mastodon bot accounts. Luckily, James offered to lend mastodon.me.uk for lifeboat purposes. Thanks to the sterling efforts of Librarian Anna and our Jianhan, all bot accounts have now been migrated, their followers being migrated with them. Splendid work all round.
In other bot news, Shedcode James has also stepped in, making a number of improvements to the codebase our written answer / statement bots run on. Ruby dependencies have been updated and unused tests and helpers removed to speed up application load. Thanks James.
Thursday and Friday of week 49 saw Librarians Anya, Jayne and Phil, together with wannabe librarian Michael, take a trip into town to celebrate the 60th birthday of the Study of Parliament Group. A splendid time being had by all. The conference peaked on the Friday with a particularly thought provoking session on how one might choose to rebuild Parliament should the old place ever burn or fall down. Once again, a drink was taken. A cheery wave to Messrs Wood, Korris, Evans and Childs. See you again on the other side?