A talk given to the IFLA Library and Research Services for Parliaments Section and IPU Joint Virtual Conference "Parliamentary library & research services – towards an agenda for the next decade"
The document discusses how the UK Parliament is building a knowledge graph to help solve problems related to managing large amounts of complex information. It provides background on what Parliament is and the challenges it faces with fragmented data across different departments and websites. It then covers how the Parliament is taking a domain-driven design approach to develop a knowledge graph, which involves modeling the key concepts and relationships within Parliament in a structured way. This includes developing ontologies around key domains like parliamentary procedure. It discusses some of the tools and visualizations that have been created so far to explore the knowledge graph, including maps of treaty procedures and tools to search for precedents.
A talk by Anya Somerville and Michael Smethurst to the Study of Parliament Group annual conference. January 2020. On modelled procedure and queryable precedence.
All Things Open 2014 - Day 1
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014
Jason Hare
Director of Open Data of the Open Data Institute
Open Government/Open Data
Sustainable Open Data Markets
Social Analytics (Nicolas Debray, Semetis)Update.be
This document provides an overview of Nicolas's background and career experiences. It also discusses the evolution of data and data visualization from the 1980s to present day. Finally, it touches on some of the opportunities and challenges around measuring social impact and converting traffic into meaningful actions and goals.
Google just revamped its social reporting within Google Analytics. Here's Semetis take on web measurement evolution and the key points of the new social analytics reporting.
The document summarizes an event bringing together systems engineers and project managers to discuss challenges in collaborating on complex projects. The agenda included presentations on how each discipline can support the other, as well as breakout groups to discuss collaboration challenges and opportunities. Previous joint events from INCOSE and APM were also summarized, finding that both fields approach problems from different perspectives but share goals around managing risks and delivering capabilities. The workshop aimed to identify concrete steps for professional organizations to improve collaboration between the two domains.
2015 06 18 datascienc meetup privacy - update - philippe van impeDigitYser
Our mission is to educate, inspire and empower scholars and professionals to apply data sciences to address humanity’s grand challenges.
We are the fastest growing community of data scientists in Europe.
We love doing Data4Good.
We promote the value of analytics and organise events, hands-on sessions and trainings to close the gap between academics and business.
Join us if you want to share, learn and have fun with analytical & technological innovation & positive social change.
The document discusses how the UK Parliament is building a knowledge graph to help solve problems related to managing large amounts of complex information. It provides background on what Parliament is and the challenges it faces with fragmented data across different departments and websites. It then covers how the Parliament is taking a domain-driven design approach to develop a knowledge graph, which involves modeling the key concepts and relationships within Parliament in a structured way. This includes developing ontologies around key domains like parliamentary procedure. It discusses some of the tools and visualizations that have been created so far to explore the knowledge graph, including maps of treaty procedures and tools to search for precedents.
A talk by Anya Somerville and Michael Smethurst to the Study of Parliament Group annual conference. January 2020. On modelled procedure and queryable precedence.
All Things Open 2014 - Day 1
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014
Jason Hare
Director of Open Data of the Open Data Institute
Open Government/Open Data
Sustainable Open Data Markets
Social Analytics (Nicolas Debray, Semetis)Update.be
This document provides an overview of Nicolas's background and career experiences. It also discusses the evolution of data and data visualization from the 1980s to present day. Finally, it touches on some of the opportunities and challenges around measuring social impact and converting traffic into meaningful actions and goals.
Google just revamped its social reporting within Google Analytics. Here's Semetis take on web measurement evolution and the key points of the new social analytics reporting.
The document summarizes an event bringing together systems engineers and project managers to discuss challenges in collaborating on complex projects. The agenda included presentations on how each discipline can support the other, as well as breakout groups to discuss collaboration challenges and opportunities. Previous joint events from INCOSE and APM were also summarized, finding that both fields approach problems from different perspectives but share goals around managing risks and delivering capabilities. The workshop aimed to identify concrete steps for professional organizations to improve collaboration between the two domains.
2015 06 18 datascienc meetup privacy - update - philippe van impeDigitYser
Our mission is to educate, inspire and empower scholars and professionals to apply data sciences to address humanity’s grand challenges.
We are the fastest growing community of data scientists in Europe.
We love doing Data4Good.
We promote the value of analytics and organise events, hands-on sessions and trainings to close the gap between academics and business.
Join us if you want to share, learn and have fun with analytical & technological innovation & positive social change.
The document discusses the Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential to accelerate the connected society. It describes how things can be connected to the internet and how this enables applications like smart cities and healthcare. Some challenges and opportunities around IoT are connectivity, data handling, new business models, sensor development and evolving technology stacks. The document promotes an Irish national IoT testbed for research and innovation partnerships through Enterprise Ireland that can fund up to 80% of costs.
The document discusses the Power of Information review from 2007 and the government's response. It argues that the government has been too slow to make use of information to increase transparency and give citizens more power over public services. It outlines four key themes of open discussion, feedback, information, and innovation and argues that government should join online conversations, publish more data, and experiment with new approaches to better engage with citizens.
The document discusses sustainable open data and the Open Data Institute (ODI). It notes that open data can help address major challenges and generate value for all. The ODI aims to support open data projects through nodes that connect organizations. The ODI is led by experts in open data and seeks to unlock economic value through transparent and reliable open data. It also stresses the importance of making open data sustainable and ensuring data quality.
This document discusses an upcoming conference on linked data and the semantic web. It highlights a keynote on linked data that will discuss important issues. It also explores how Web 3.0 differs from previous versions and brings more structure and meaning to information on the web. Finally, it reports on a company's development of a commercial application using semantic web technologies.
The document discusses the UK government's open data initiative and its benefits. It launched an online data repository and required government departments to publish non-personal data. This enabled developers to create applications that increased transparency, drove economic and social benefits, and engaged citizens with public information in new ways. The initiative established best practices for releasing and linking open data that other governments and organizations can learn from.
CATE was a website created to provide an online taxonomy of aroid plants, with the goals of creating an up-to-date classification reference and sustaining itself through user contributions. However, few users beyond the initial experts contributed edits. The challenges included defining problems in a way regular users found engaging, attracting a wide audience, and distributing curation efforts beyond the initial organizers to maintain the site over time.
Knud Möller from Talis Systems gave a presentation on moving data to the cloud at the European Data Forum in Copenhagen on June 7, 2012. The presentation discussed how the LATC project, which helped develop linked open data platforms and tools, was ending but the work would continue through other projects like LOD2 and Planet Data. Möller highlighted several real-world examples of linked open data being used and encouraged the audience to open their data and link it. He also noted that LATC could continue assisting with tools, best practices, and EU linked open data datasets.
The document discusses a Web of Science Meetup at SXSW 2017 focused on bringing together science and technology. The meetup aims to reduce technical difficulties and barriers to discovery by making science more inclusive, effective, and productive through open science and engaging more people using web technologies. Key questions discussed include how to attract and keep developers involved in science, engage more of the community, and ways for people to get involved.
Martin is the Chair of Governors at Bewdley Primary School, a software developer, EdTech founder, and advocate for computing education. He is also soon to be a PGCE student and holds a PhD and black belt. Martin believes it is important to teach computing to children as the UK will need over 745,000 additional digital workers by 2017, and 90% of new jobs require some digital skills. Children must be prepared for jobs that have yet to be created. The UK leads in e-commerce exports and internet access globally. Martin suggests starting with digital leaders, embedding ICT across the curriculum, discovering coding with kids, and recognizing that programming is a form of literacy.
The document summarizes the process taken by the Alameda Unified School District (AUSD) to develop a new "Master Plan" through community engagement and consensus building. It describes how AUSD shifted from a traditional strategic planning process to an emergent and iterative approach that engaged various stakeholders. This included hosting numerous meetings, developing multiple scenarios around issues like budget cuts and school closures, and addressing public concerns to build support for a new parcel tax. The presenters reflect on lessons learned, such as using data to move discussions towards consensus, addressing conflict to find "wins", and the importance of clear information sharing and public engagement to develop solutions grounded in the community.
The challenges of building a strong data infrastructureJeni Tennison
In the 21st century, data is infrastructure for our economy, just like roads. In this session, Jeni will talk about the big challenges of building a strong data infrastructure: challenges of equality of access, challenges of privacy and trust, and the technical challenges of discovery and interoperability.
NHS IQ LTC Lunch & Learn: Practical strategies for innovating in health & hou...NHS Improving Quality
NHS Improving Quality, Long Term Conditions Lunch & Learn: Practical strategies for innovating in health & housing with Paul Taylor and Will Lilley from Bromford Lab
This document discusses unique identifier generation in distributed systems. It notes that sequential IDs are not always feasible in distributed systems. While GUIDs are universally unique, they are too long at 36 characters. The document explores balancing ID length with collision probability. It models collision probability based on ID length and number of IDs. Simulation results show an 8 character ID has low collision probability currently but this may increase with more IDs. The document concludes an 8 character ID is sufficient now but length may need to increase to accommodate future growth.
This document discusses unlocking the potential of a large dataset of UK parliamentary questions and answers containing over 1.5 million records. It describes the key fields in the data, issues with missing or outdated information, and distributions that follow power laws. The data could be further enriched by importing more question fields, related items, and subject indexing. Networks could be built to visualize relationships between members and answering departments. The public could conduct new analyses through an open data platform to gain insights.
This document outlines the key concepts and components involved in modeling procedural workflows, including steps, routes, work packages, and causal relationships between elements. It describes an ontology where nodes represent procedural steps and edges indicate routes, and defines semantic relationships like requires, allows, and precludes to link steps based on prerequisites and consequences. Finally, it provides an example procedural workflow for establishing a statutory instrument and committee.
1. A new data platform was created for Parliament using Azure cloud hosting, a Triplestore graph database, Logic Apps for orchestration, and Functions for data transformation.
2. The infrastructure is managed with VSTS and defined using ARM templates and PowerShell scripts. An OWL ontology was created to model the data.
3. The platform provides constituency data and SPARQL querying on beta.parliament.uk and uses Application Insights for telemetry and PowerBI for performance reporting.
What do Twitter conversations tell us about petitioning?UK Parliament Data
1. Twitter conversations about petitions vary greatly in the level of engagement beyond just signing, from a few tweets to thousands, suggesting people sign petitions as a form of slacktivism or to genuinely engage in the issue.
2. Analysis of tweets about the grouse shooting petition found discussions of the positives and negatives of hunting, and criticism of the polarized parliamentary debate as favoring one side.
3. Those tweeting about petitions interact in closed communities with those they already agree with, indicating conversations reinforce existing views rather than consider different perspectives.
The UK Parliament has a long history of restricting access to its proceedings that began to change in the late 18th century. While publishers began reporting on debates, financial difficulties led Parliament to take over publishing in 1909. In the 1990s, costs increased and availability decreased until Parliament launched its website in 1996, making Hansard freely available online for the first time. Indexing of proceedings also evolved from handwritten notes to utilizing computers beginning in the 1960s to create searchable online resources that increased public access to parliamentary information.
This document discusses domain-driven design and why it is useful. It notes that both language and organizations can be messy, and that domain-driven design aims to create a shared language and model within an organization's domain. The document provides examples of domain modeling work done for the UK parliament and recommends collaborative modeling to understand an organization's implicit dependencies.
The document discusses open sourcing democracy through projects like OpenPolitics and HaveSomeNew that aim to lower barriers to participation, use open review processes and version control, and allow anyone to contribute. It notes that digital democracy should not just replicate 18th century systems on smartphones but should be a collaborative, distributed and open political statement that helps humanity act as a collaborative global species.
This document summarizes a meetup about parliament data and democracy. Feedback was requested from previous meetups. Suggestions were made for future talks and identifying needs for parliamentary data. Comments on the speaker's presentation style were shared. The meetup covered topics like data modeling, platforms, and services. It was noted the meetup is about more than just data and technology, also discussing democracy and how to best build transparent data services while working with users.
The document discusses the Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential to accelerate the connected society. It describes how things can be connected to the internet and how this enables applications like smart cities and healthcare. Some challenges and opportunities around IoT are connectivity, data handling, new business models, sensor development and evolving technology stacks. The document promotes an Irish national IoT testbed for research and innovation partnerships through Enterprise Ireland that can fund up to 80% of costs.
The document discusses the Power of Information review from 2007 and the government's response. It argues that the government has been too slow to make use of information to increase transparency and give citizens more power over public services. It outlines four key themes of open discussion, feedback, information, and innovation and argues that government should join online conversations, publish more data, and experiment with new approaches to better engage with citizens.
The document discusses sustainable open data and the Open Data Institute (ODI). It notes that open data can help address major challenges and generate value for all. The ODI aims to support open data projects through nodes that connect organizations. The ODI is led by experts in open data and seeks to unlock economic value through transparent and reliable open data. It also stresses the importance of making open data sustainable and ensuring data quality.
This document discusses an upcoming conference on linked data and the semantic web. It highlights a keynote on linked data that will discuss important issues. It also explores how Web 3.0 differs from previous versions and brings more structure and meaning to information on the web. Finally, it reports on a company's development of a commercial application using semantic web technologies.
The document discusses the UK government's open data initiative and its benefits. It launched an online data repository and required government departments to publish non-personal data. This enabled developers to create applications that increased transparency, drove economic and social benefits, and engaged citizens with public information in new ways. The initiative established best practices for releasing and linking open data that other governments and organizations can learn from.
CATE was a website created to provide an online taxonomy of aroid plants, with the goals of creating an up-to-date classification reference and sustaining itself through user contributions. However, few users beyond the initial experts contributed edits. The challenges included defining problems in a way regular users found engaging, attracting a wide audience, and distributing curation efforts beyond the initial organizers to maintain the site over time.
Knud Möller from Talis Systems gave a presentation on moving data to the cloud at the European Data Forum in Copenhagen on June 7, 2012. The presentation discussed how the LATC project, which helped develop linked open data platforms and tools, was ending but the work would continue through other projects like LOD2 and Planet Data. Möller highlighted several real-world examples of linked open data being used and encouraged the audience to open their data and link it. He also noted that LATC could continue assisting with tools, best practices, and EU linked open data datasets.
The document discusses a Web of Science Meetup at SXSW 2017 focused on bringing together science and technology. The meetup aims to reduce technical difficulties and barriers to discovery by making science more inclusive, effective, and productive through open science and engaging more people using web technologies. Key questions discussed include how to attract and keep developers involved in science, engage more of the community, and ways for people to get involved.
Martin is the Chair of Governors at Bewdley Primary School, a software developer, EdTech founder, and advocate for computing education. He is also soon to be a PGCE student and holds a PhD and black belt. Martin believes it is important to teach computing to children as the UK will need over 745,000 additional digital workers by 2017, and 90% of new jobs require some digital skills. Children must be prepared for jobs that have yet to be created. The UK leads in e-commerce exports and internet access globally. Martin suggests starting with digital leaders, embedding ICT across the curriculum, discovering coding with kids, and recognizing that programming is a form of literacy.
The document summarizes the process taken by the Alameda Unified School District (AUSD) to develop a new "Master Plan" through community engagement and consensus building. It describes how AUSD shifted from a traditional strategic planning process to an emergent and iterative approach that engaged various stakeholders. This included hosting numerous meetings, developing multiple scenarios around issues like budget cuts and school closures, and addressing public concerns to build support for a new parcel tax. The presenters reflect on lessons learned, such as using data to move discussions towards consensus, addressing conflict to find "wins", and the importance of clear information sharing and public engagement to develop solutions grounded in the community.
The challenges of building a strong data infrastructureJeni Tennison
In the 21st century, data is infrastructure for our economy, just like roads. In this session, Jeni will talk about the big challenges of building a strong data infrastructure: challenges of equality of access, challenges of privacy and trust, and the technical challenges of discovery and interoperability.
NHS IQ LTC Lunch & Learn: Practical strategies for innovating in health & hou...NHS Improving Quality
NHS Improving Quality, Long Term Conditions Lunch & Learn: Practical strategies for innovating in health & housing with Paul Taylor and Will Lilley from Bromford Lab
This document discusses unique identifier generation in distributed systems. It notes that sequential IDs are not always feasible in distributed systems. While GUIDs are universally unique, they are too long at 36 characters. The document explores balancing ID length with collision probability. It models collision probability based on ID length and number of IDs. Simulation results show an 8 character ID has low collision probability currently but this may increase with more IDs. The document concludes an 8 character ID is sufficient now but length may need to increase to accommodate future growth.
This document discusses unlocking the potential of a large dataset of UK parliamentary questions and answers containing over 1.5 million records. It describes the key fields in the data, issues with missing or outdated information, and distributions that follow power laws. The data could be further enriched by importing more question fields, related items, and subject indexing. Networks could be built to visualize relationships between members and answering departments. The public could conduct new analyses through an open data platform to gain insights.
This document outlines the key concepts and components involved in modeling procedural workflows, including steps, routes, work packages, and causal relationships between elements. It describes an ontology where nodes represent procedural steps and edges indicate routes, and defines semantic relationships like requires, allows, and precludes to link steps based on prerequisites and consequences. Finally, it provides an example procedural workflow for establishing a statutory instrument and committee.
1. A new data platform was created for Parliament using Azure cloud hosting, a Triplestore graph database, Logic Apps for orchestration, and Functions for data transformation.
2. The infrastructure is managed with VSTS and defined using ARM templates and PowerShell scripts. An OWL ontology was created to model the data.
3. The platform provides constituency data and SPARQL querying on beta.parliament.uk and uses Application Insights for telemetry and PowerBI for performance reporting.
What do Twitter conversations tell us about petitioning?UK Parliament Data
1. Twitter conversations about petitions vary greatly in the level of engagement beyond just signing, from a few tweets to thousands, suggesting people sign petitions as a form of slacktivism or to genuinely engage in the issue.
2. Analysis of tweets about the grouse shooting petition found discussions of the positives and negatives of hunting, and criticism of the polarized parliamentary debate as favoring one side.
3. Those tweeting about petitions interact in closed communities with those they already agree with, indicating conversations reinforce existing views rather than consider different perspectives.
The UK Parliament has a long history of restricting access to its proceedings that began to change in the late 18th century. While publishers began reporting on debates, financial difficulties led Parliament to take over publishing in 1909. In the 1990s, costs increased and availability decreased until Parliament launched its website in 1996, making Hansard freely available online for the first time. Indexing of proceedings also evolved from handwritten notes to utilizing computers beginning in the 1960s to create searchable online resources that increased public access to parliamentary information.
This document discusses domain-driven design and why it is useful. It notes that both language and organizations can be messy, and that domain-driven design aims to create a shared language and model within an organization's domain. The document provides examples of domain modeling work done for the UK parliament and recommends collaborative modeling to understand an organization's implicit dependencies.
The document discusses open sourcing democracy through projects like OpenPolitics and HaveSomeNew that aim to lower barriers to participation, use open review processes and version control, and allow anyone to contribute. It notes that digital democracy should not just replicate 18th century systems on smartphones but should be a collaborative, distributed and open political statement that helps humanity act as a collaborative global species.
This document summarizes a meetup about parliament data and democracy. Feedback was requested from previous meetups. Suggestions were made for future talks and identifying needs for parliamentary data. Comments on the speaker's presentation style were shared. The meetup covered topics like data modeling, platforms, and services. It was noted the meetup is about more than just data and technology, also discussing democracy and how to best build transparent data services while working with users.
This document discusses ways to engage with parliamentary data by scraping websites to extract information and make it more accessible. Early efforts included scraping websites to create databases of bills and votes, while more recent work focuses on annotating and linking parliamentary content and proceedings to outside discussions and analysis on social networks.
How technology can help you monitor your MP’s performance - Steve GoodrichUK Parliament Data
This document discusses how technology can help monitor an MP's performance. It outlines an MP's responsibilities to their constituents and party. It then lists some metrics that websites like TheyWorkForYou provide, such as key votes and conflicts of interest disclosures. The document asks what other transparency measures could be good, and cautions that corruption should be monitored proactively rather than waiting for scandals.
This document discusses mapping population data for the UK Parliament. It explains that the House of Commons Library provides parliamentary data and mapping ethnic separation in constituencies using census data on ethnic groups and output areas. It also describes how the Office for National Statistics produces small area population estimates for different geographic areas annually, but these are missing natural settlement boundaries and custom area estimates. Finally, it outlines the 2018 boundary review that reduced constituencies to 600 within 5% of the average size.
Jennifer Schaus and Associates hosts a complimentary webinar series on The FAR in 2024. Join the webinars on Wednesdays and Fridays at noon, eastern.
Recordings are on YouTube and the company website.
https://www.youtube.com/@jenniferschaus/videos
Presentation by Rebecca Sachs and Joshua Varcie, analysts in CBO’s Health Analysis Division, at the 13th Annual Conference of the American Society of Health Economists.
Presentation by Julie Topoleski, CBO’s Director of Labor, Income Security, and Long-Term Analysis, at the 16th Annual Meeting of the OECD Working Party of Parliamentary Budget Officials and Independent Fiscal Institutions.
Jennifer Schaus and Associates hosts a complimentary webinar series on The FAR in 2024. Join the webinars on Wednesdays and Fridays at noon, eastern.
Recordings are on YouTube and the company website.
https://www.youtube.com/@jenniferschaus/videos
The Antyodaya Saral Haryana Portal is a pioneering initiative by the Government of Haryana aimed at providing citizens with seamless access to a wide range of government services
How To Cultivate Community Affinity Throughout The Generosity JourneyAggregage
This session will dive into how to create rich generosity experiences that foster long-lasting relationships. You’ll walk away with actionable insights to redefine how you engage with your supporters — emphasizing trust, engagement, and community!
karnataka housing board schemes . all schemesnarinav14
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Bharat Mata - History of Indian culture.pdfBharat Mata
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AHMR is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed online journal created to encourage and facilitate the study of all aspects (socio-economic, political, legislative and developmental) of Human Mobility in Africa. Through the publication of original research, policy discussions and evidence research papers AHMR provides a comprehensive forum devoted exclusively to the analysis of contemporaneous trends, migration patterns and some of the most important migration-related issues.
In 2018 we were asked to make a publicly available Statutory Instrument tracking service. And we did.
For those new to Statutory Instruments
Acts of Parliament delegate certain powers to ministers
Ministers create secondary legislation under these powers
In the UK SIs are the most frequently used type of secondary legislation
The problem we needed to solve was how to reconcile information about the passage of Sis
This information is produced by lots of offices in Parliament
Almost all offices in both Houses touch on SI procedure: both Journal Offices, both Table Offices and various committees
In order to track an SI one needs to track the activities of assorted committees and offices represented here.
People found it difficult to track the journey of an SI through Parliament
Even Members of Parliament and library researchers struggled
We are information modellers and managers. We think this is an information management problem
But information management is often no-one’s job
At this point we turn to our trusty iceberg metaphor
Making websites, visualisations and querying data is relatively easy
Making a data platform and models that are as flexible as Parliament is harder
Managing the information is harder still
Managing the information when it’s not in anyone’s job description starts to get impossible
And you pretty quickly reach the event horizon of the possible
But the problem is more than just jobs and roles
Information management is only ever as good as the tools available
How those tools are commissioned and paid for influences and constrains the shape of the data they produce
Given each office has their own view of the things they’re interested in, we often end up commissioning tools to digitise existing office bound processes and missing out on the bigger picture
In order to make services that meet needs outside individual offices we need to step back and look for new patterns that don’t stop at office walls
We work with researchers, lawyers and clerks to explore the territory from as many angles as possible and use conversation and whiteboards to identify bounded contexts that make sense beyond any particular office
Because procedure is largely based on precedent, no one story can ever be taken as the whole truth
When we first started on the SI service, everyone we met brought us a flowchart
All drawn from a certain perspective and none complete
Over several months we talked and sketched and brought together multiple perspectives
The result was a process flow model - or, as parliamentarians might say - a procedure model
It allows us to state that, given what has happened, what may, must and can’t happen next
A clerk would not recognise this model
It is generic, having no domain knowledge or domain language encoded
Whilst the model may be generic, layered on top are procedural maps
Most of our time is spent mapping procedures on top of the model
This is an example of a procedure map, for made affirmative statutory instruments.
Is this Rules as Code?
Procedure is informed by several strata of what one might - perhaps mistakenly - call “rules”
This is a picture we stole from a retired Clerk of Committees
It shows the components that inform procedure
The further down the stack the more immutable
The wider the bar the greater the coverage
In order to map procedure we need to take account of legislation, standing orders, speaker rulings and precedence
And we also need to take account of “muddling through” because improvisation is how a lot of things work
At this point we tend to invoke the Cynefin framework
Much software has been designed and built on the assumption that Parliament operates in a complicated space
This is not true
Parliament is a complex adaptive system
”Rules” are malleable
Tightly coupling the implementation of software and data models to defined rulesets makes the software and its resulting information brittle and liable to break under change
So whilst the procedure model can be interpreted as conservative on output, it is always liberal on input
We’ve not talked about what users might need from an SI tracking service
We find that an emphasis on user needs isn’t always helpful
By concentrating on describing the domain we don’t lock ourselves into single solutions
Not only do needs differ across user groups, sometimes our users have needs that are diametrically opposed to the needs of other users
This being the nature of politics
So what did we build?
This is the statutory instrument website that Parliament asked for
A website that can flex and adapt as Parliament flexes and adapts
By understanding the domain, choosing the right bounded contexts we can do more
We took the same model and – with relatively little work - overlaid a map of the procedure for treaties
And with almost no work made a website and a library of queries for treaty procedure too
We’ve already mentioned that the maps can be parsed by machines to determine - from what has happened - what may, must and shouldn’t happen next
We call this the light cone of procedural possibilities
We can use this data to alert Members to points at which they can intervene, for example: today is the last day you can object to this SI.
If you’re a researcher, we have a pot of data we can query for precedence
Queries such as: when did X and Y both happen when Z didn’t
We can use the pot of data to look for patterns
This is one example showing the number of days between laying and approval of draft affirmative instruments
More importantly, the queries are repeatable
Nobody asked for Twitter bots for SIs and treaties but a couple of hours work and we now have 237 people following avidly
In summary
Information management is hard work
Understanding the domain is not quick
But well modelled, well managed information is generative
Possibilities emerge when you take the time and trouble to understand the domain
We ask ourselves – if Erskine May had had a computer – what would he have done
We think possibly…
He would have used it to build a graph of knowledge of parliamentary business
And built a precedence engine out of data
Thank you