27 November 2012

Vicki measuring the curtains at the Legislative Assembly

| johnboy
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The ACT Legislative Assembly website has a shiny new welcome message from new Speaker Vicki Dunne.

It’s the usual motherhood statements with a note that she’s the first member of the opposition to be in the big seat.

And then the bad news:

In coming months a new, redeveloped website will be launched which aims to improve the way that information is organised and presented. Informed by extensive consultation with users of the site, the new site will have a cleaner, more consistent look and feel and will make information more accessible to a range of users.

*le sigh*

Parliamentary websites (and I’ve been fiddling with them since 1997) are always complicated non-user friendly beasts because they reflect the nature of the information on them.

They’re never going to Cracked.com and they really shouldn’t try.

A re-design is unlikely to make the Assembly more accessible. But it will mean everyone currently using it won’t know where anything is and those who maintain it will be putting things in the wrong places for months.

If they wanted to make the Assembly more accessible they’d be cutting the video feed up and getting it on YouTube in near realtime.

I guess we’ll have to see which piratic local web solutions mob will be paid squillions to arse it all up.

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Just trying to imagine Cracked.com type articles:

Ten inadvertently funny press releases by ACT Ministers.

No, it doesn’t work at all.

switch said :

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

Charlton Ogburn, “Merrill’s Marauders”, Harpers Magazine, January 1957

Sounds a bit like David Morgan, former Secretary to the Treasury about the problems he had trying to convince Bob Hawke to introduce the GST in 1985. On the ABC’s classic documentary Labor In Power, Morgan explained that just when he’d convinced Hawke of the need for the GST the union leaders and backbenchers would nobble him and he’d backslide and announce it was off. Keating and Morgan would then have to convince Hawke again to bring it in, Hawke would again agree then the same thing would happen. Morgan said that it was like playing and winning the grand final only to be told a few days later that they would have to play the grand final all over again.

Needs to be 100% Flash and Shockwave based, with MIDI music.

[skip intro]

cmdwedge said :

Have to disagree here, JB. The website could be a LOT better and a lot more interactive/user friendly. It has very strong 1996 web overtones and could do with a spruce up.

We don’t need to waste tax payer’s money on interactivity for a website no one wants to interact with…

Can we run a competition?

I vote that Z(er)oo or some other team of poseurs will win the contract, stuff it full of bells and whistles and some animal totems, then be replaced by Squiztard who will make it unusable yet accessible, then be replaced by Visionless Australis who will make it work on braille keyboards but burn peoples retinas with it’s stark whiteness, then be replaced by Drupal and a team of contractors, later to be replaced by some new fangled web 3.0 mobile device driven drivel….

maybe they should just go back to letter box drops and hire a town crier?

Get Kate Jackson on too it – she’s pretty good with computer systems.

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

Charlton Ogburn, “Merrill’s Marauders”, Harpers Magazine, January 1957

Have to disagree here, JB. The website could be a LOT better and a lot more interactive/user friendly. It has very strong 1996 web overtones and could do with a spruce up.

Angels and ministers of grace preserve us from an interactive parliamentary website.

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