Dan Hilton

Having worked at the Welsh Assembly and had to regularly use their website for preparing briefing, I was interested to see the new site

up and live. However, my shock was at the past record of proceedings. Rather than keeping the (bad) html versions, they distilled all the original word docs into pdfs, a inaccessible format (according to Adobe own checker which I checked them with).

Now normally I wouldn’t be as fussed - you see design choices like this across the web, mainly made to save money and to lower scope. I understand that and I also understand that re-formating eight years of proceedings is no fun. However, having endeavoured to help MySociety, I wanted to add the Welsh Assembly to theyworkforyou.com. Now I have to scrap a lot of the code and start again.

Adding support for the Welsh Assembly record of proceedings would mean that all those AM’s who are blogging crazy, could have widgets displaying their last speeches and questions from the Senedd. You could also have an alerts system, like Google alerts and get an email when a particular topic came up. Beats paying crazy money for ‘monitoring’ from lobby firms.

Needless to say I am making headway, having got a list of the current AM’s in an xml format like the house of commons and am working towards integrating the old AM’s.