It’s my current understanding that when the Office of the Clerk launches their new Hansard web publishing system later in the year the semantically meaningful CSS class names will no longer be present in the new HTML output. I’ve been informed that behind the scenes the metadata rich HTML is still going to be present in the Office of the Clerk’s internal process flow. My hope is that we can convince the Office of the Clerk to continue to make the current HTML format available alongside the new output format. But I’m afraid it might take hundreds of people and a few MPs complaining before they’ll consider authorizing their IT staff to do this.

Che, I share your desire to see people being able to interact more with Parliamentary information and processes. Paul Reynolds has mentioned a summary of some of my social software ideas for theyworkforyou.co.nz in a recent post about e-democracy.

Expect to see innovation continue at TheyWorkForYou.co.nz. I’ve just added sparklines to the portfolios index to oral answers, making trends in oral answers more obvious. RSS/Atom and social features coming soon!

the main criticism i’ve heard of the site is that while it’s great you’re repackaging information for public consumption, you’re really just aggregating information that is already freely available. another way to put is it is that you’ve really written the site that parliament should have.

there was also concern expressed after the great blend that you might be overly suspicious of the select committee office. if you were to simply take one of them out for a coffee, and sell your ideas, they’d likely had over all kinds of information willingly! this isn’t the USA. here we like to give information to ‘the people’.

what i’d like to see on this site is the ability for interested persons not only to access the information in a palatable form (which you’ve provided), but to *utilise* the information in/on their own sites.

and by that i mean in forms like art, literature, or music. having you package the information in such a form (which is beyond my technical ability to explain), would really open up the utility of your site, IMHO.