Over 700 new meetings … and government needs a CSV data validation service
Who’s Lobbying has this week added over 700 new ministerial meetings from August to September 2010.
Our updated analysis shows the five organisations UK ministers reported the most meetings with, from May to September 2010, are:
- Confederation of British Industry 44 meetings
- Trades Union Congress 23 meetings
- Local Government Association 19 meetings
- Barclays 14 meetings
- World Wide Fund for Nature 14 meetings
Departments are publishing their ministerial meeting reports 3 months after the end of the period covered.
We have to wait over 3 months after a meeting to see it reported. In contrast, some departments seem to keep their photo stream on flickr updated on a daily basis.
Prime Minister David Cameron speaks to BRE chief executive Peter Bonfield on 16 December 2010. The Prime Minister’s Office will publish in March or April 2011 the ministerial meetings report mentioning this meeting.
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
Individual departments are still reporting meetings in wildly different formats, making meeting analysis unnecessarily time consuming and error prone.
Most departments published the August-September 2010 ministerial meeting data a CSV (comma-separated value) formatted file.
Although easy to machine read, a CSV file is only useful if all departments publish data with
The Department of Health, HM Treasury, and DFID published meeting data in PDF files.
DCMS was the only department to publish the data in a RTF file.
The Home Office published more than one table of data in the same CSV file, which makes machine processing much more difficult.
DECC publish meetings in a separate file per minister, which is unnecessarily different from the other departments.
The Cabinet Office should be running a light-weight online automated data validation service to ensure the consistency of the CSV data released across departments.
Departments, before they publish, should be required to validate their CSV by submitting it to the online validation service and correcting any errors reported.
Data inconsistency is interfering with delivery of the Government’s transparency policy.
If government expects outside organisations to be building services on top of government released data then it needs to address the current data inconsistency problem in the next few months.
