On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Tim Duckett <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hansard is a world away from local government when > it comes to scrapeable transparency. So far we've been working on > indexing the docs and presenting that content alongside search results > from the main SCC site. It's not TWFY, but at least it provides a > better way of exposing individual activity that would otherwise be > buried away in documents. I had the same issues when I did this for Belfast City Council about 4 years ago. After pestering them for ages about their minutes system, and ridiculing them publicly a couple of times about just how bad it was, (and of course by building an alternative site), they eventually commissioned a new system, which of course meant that all the work I'd put into delicately scraping as much data as I could out of their Word docs (which were mostly in a different format for each committee), all suddenly broke as they moved to PDFs in a completely new layout. As I'd moved to Estonia by that stage my interest in taking this further with this had declined somewhat, but it was a great learning experience, and I heard from several sources (backed up by the logs) that quite a lot of people who worked at the Council had been using my site to find information from historic minutes rather than having to grapple with the official one. I'll certainly help out if anyone else is interested in doing anything more with Belfast. Tony
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