e-government - more understanding needed by the Civil Service?
Progressive Ireland has quite a scoop about the Oireachtas' first toe in the water with RSS feeds. We note also (through following RR's link) that live webcasting from the national parliament is on the agenda, too. Soon, international political junkies will be able to marvel - in realtime - at a Dáil session in full flow. Whatever will they think of the Drumcondra Renaissance Man, we wonder?
However, we have a few issues with the technical implementation of this worthy undertaking.
i) the RSS feed is so far sparse on information. You have to click through to the actual WWW page to get at the information, which is a click too far. Why offer the RSS feed in the first place?
ii) the schedule of committee meetings is unfortunately in Word format, rather than HTML. Tying documents to a non-open format is coming to be recognised as a serious long-term liability, and they shouldn't be doing it.
iii) The live webcasting uses Windows Media Player, which of course (like Word) is a closed, proprietary format. It's really not tenable for the State to favour a particular vendor's technology in this manner, and we suspect the EU may have a few words to say on the subject in the future (as per the recent ruling about giving preference for Intel processors over other x86 implementations).
However, we have a few issues with the technical implementation of this worthy undertaking.
i) the RSS feed is so far sparse on information. You have to click through to the actual WWW page to get at the information, which is a click too far. Why offer the RSS feed in the first place?
ii) the schedule of committee meetings is unfortunately in Word format, rather than HTML. Tying documents to a non-open format is coming to be recognised as a serious long-term liability, and they shouldn't be doing it.
iii) The live webcasting uses Windows Media Player, which of course (like Word) is a closed, proprietary format. It's really not tenable for the State to favour a particular vendor's technology in this manner, and we suspect the EU may have a few words to say on the subject in the future (as per the recent ruling about giving preference for Intel processors over other x86 implementations).
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