Tell Them What You Think

TTWYT’s development blog and related musings

TellThemWhatYouThink.org now has an official twitter feed. Each government consultation discovered by the site is now posted to Twitter. Enjoy!

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.