Tell Them What You Think

TTWYT’s development blog and related musings

TellThemWhatYouThink now supports comments. This is a very small first step towards the site supporting proper discussion.

Also among the new additions: I’ve added a tabbed interface at the bottom of each consultation page, so that more stuff can go there in the future without the pages getting really huge. Feedback welcome. At the moment, the other tabs are for incoming links — which now displays links from Bloglines, which seems to produce better results than Technorati — and “Spread the word” which has links to all the popular social bookmarking tools. I hope there’ll be more stuff there eventually, but I’m not sure what: what do you think?

Eventually, there’ll be options for keeping track of a consultation, being notified when one is published (or isn’t!) by email or rss, and widgets that you can put on your own site. Watch this space!

I’ve been working with Mark Horrell and Steph Gray at DIUS over the last couple of months to improve TellThemWhatYouThink’s support for their consultations.

It has been a splendid experience. DIUS’s consultations are now provided in an XML feed — lovely, structured ATOM goodness with custom elements galore, available to all. DIUS are the first (hopefully of many!) to provide their data in such a useful format, for which they deserve some serious kudos.

Not all has gone perfectly, though. I discovered that the library I was using to parse this feed did not understand custom ATOM elements at all, and as a result, the consultations appearing on the site were pretty garbled. I’ve fixed the problem now, but the consultations I had gathered before today were pretty messed up, so I’ve removed them from the site. The consultations which were currently live were gathered from the ATOM feed — correctly, this time — during the scrape last night and are now all present and correct. Apologies to anyone who got a duplicate email alert or who was inconvenienced by the sudden loss of content!

Thanks very much to Justin Kerr-Stevens for meeting me, to the Open Rights Group for the hook-up, and to Mark & Steph for all their work.

The MCGA have recently deployed a new version of their website. It has been significantly overhauled, and is much improved. Unfortunately, this has created some problems:

First, all links from TellThemWhatYouThink to content on the MCGA website have broken. Many government departments do not bother to ensure that their URIs remain alive after a consultation is completed. Often, they disappear quite quickly after a consultation concludes, or they are changed from something like:

www.department.gov.uk/open/someconsultation

to:

www.department.gov.uk/closed/someconsultation

This is really quite annoying. To deal with this problem, or at least, to lessen its impact, TellThemWhatYouThink checks all outgoing links to ensure that they are still alive. If they aren’t, a page is displayed with some (hopefully) useful suggestions — search for it on Google, and similar.

Unfortunately, this isn’t working with the MCGA, because they’re not returning the correct error code (404) when someone tries to access a dead link. Instead, they return a code indicating that the page has moved (302), and provide the URI of a custom error page as the new location. This is really broken: a 302 redirect should be used when content at a particular URI has moved to a new one, not when it has been removed completely.

Second, their new consultations does not exclusively contain consultations. It also contains awful, incomprehensible mess. Doubtless this is useful and meaningful to some people, but it is certainly not a consultation in the normal sense of the word: it it presumably a response. Whether or not the response itself is open to further comment, I do not know. The page doesn’t say.

Of the links on the consultation page,  only one looks to me like an actual consultation. Its structure does not bode well.

I shall review the MCGA website every so often to see if a new consultation has emerged to which the current one could be compared, and to see if any useful structure is present in the document. For now, though, I think it is broken, so I’m removing it from TellThemWhatYouThink until it can be supported again.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence and the Legal Services Commission have been added today.

Unfortunately, support for NICE is pretty patchy. It’s the same old story: When their website is better,  TTWYT will be able to display more!

The site will now display all the Ofsted consultations it can find. I hope this means that, along with the DCSF, the site will now find all government consultations relating to education.

That said, a little bird told me that schools regularly receive consultation documents, often directed at specific heads of department, with requests that they participate. I don’t know the details yet. If they are “private” consultations then I suppose that’s all well and good, but one does wonder if they might just be public ones that no one knows about!

Hopefully I’ll have some more information about that soon — watch this space!

One of the things I hope that TTWYT might accomplish is to stimulate more “blogospheric” debate when consultations are released. It would be marvellous if the publication of an important consultation led to lots of excellent blog posts followed by the submission of lots of independent* responses!

To that end, each consultation’s details page now displays a list of pages which have linked to the consultation, as reported by Technorati.
* I say independent because I am reliably informed that when a response to a consultation is submitted in the names of multiple people, it is common practice to count it as a response from one individual, rather than several. Argh!