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.

Not many people will have pondered the huge gap between the dream of e-democracy and the harsh, frontpage induced web roadkill, that passes for some elected officials websites. The various political magazines such as the New Statesmen. So in a vain attempt to improve the status of Politian websites in the Uk (and maybe the world) I present my essential habits of Successful political websites. and the House magazine have both tried to champion online sites of Polititians in an effort to drive up standards through competition. However, Politics still seems to be way behind other sectors in embracing the technological advantages that can win them votes. The past winners of such awards always seem to be those Politians willing to have a little fun at their own expense, for example Widdy Web and Paul Flyn’s contribution to the Web. Even the New Statesmen recognised the problems in 2005 when they failed to award the prize to any

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