Last year the House of Commons published the Equality Bill in a trial format. The text of the Equality Bill and its Explanatory Notes was published as one document, with the Bill text and Explanatory Note text interwoven throughout the document.
Latest developments
Following feedback from the Equality Bill exercise we have developed the interwoven idea further. We have posted an experimental version of the Digital Economy Bill on a separate website so that we can experiment with the online presentation of a Bill.
This latest version allows you to move from the clauses of the Bill to the section of the Act the clause will affect. (At present some of the links take you to the Act as originally passed by Parliament and others take you to the updated version of the Act. Ideally all links would take you to the updated Act but for now we hope that this gives you an indication of what we are trying to achieve.)
We have also made improvements to the layout of the interwoven Bill & Explanatory Notes, you now have the option to display relevant explanatory text (taken from the Explanatory Note) below or alongside each clause of the Bill.
There are still several formatting and presentational issues on some browsers, for best results try FireFox or Safari.
Tell us what you think
We would like to hear from you:
- Do you find this version of the Bill helpful?
- Does it help you carry out your work?
- Does it help you understand the purpose and content of the Bill?
- How can we improve the presentation of Explanatory Notes?
- What else could we do to make it easier for you to work with these Bill documents and to make them serve your needs better?
For those more technically minded, our developers would be particularly interested to know:
- Is the use of RDFa useful?
- Should the HTML produced be valid HTML 5?
- Should fragments of Bills be made available, in addition to the whole Bill?
- Should a Bill still be readable on a browser without CSS or Javascript available?
Let us know what you think on the blog comments or by email: webmaster@parliament.uk
6 comments
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11/02/2010 at 2:14 pm
Nigel Moss
Commendable work, and glad to see you are pushing to make the Parliamentary process accessible
“Should the HTML produced be valid HTML 5?”
As HTML 5 is still only a working draft, I would suggest you should use the current version being 4.01. When HTML 5 is finalised, it will likely still be some time before the major browsers catch up
“Should a Bill still be readable on a browser without CSS or Javascript available?”
Absolutely! This shouldn’t even need to be asked in 2010, to be honest.
18/02/2010 at 8:48 am
Nick Booth
The whole does not seem as commentable as I would like – after it’s a bill, still open for discussion. I was expecting something along the lines of commentariat, a format which promotes conversation rather than emulates (mostly) current print pratices.
Have I got the wrong end of the stick here?
18/02/2010 at 12:58 pm
Tim Green
So when are we just going to get an open data version of bills so other people can build good interfaces around them? FreeOurBills has been campaigning for this for ages, and the best that seems to have been done is add a few links to existing non-open data bills.
18/02/2010 at 4:03 pm
Jackie
Hi Nick
The pages that we are currently demonstrating look at the online presentation of a Bill.
The purpose of this work is to make it easier for people to understand the purpose of a Bill and how it will impact existing legislation.
The whole idea about commenting on the content of a Bill is a different, though related, topic.
The House of Lords Information Committee and the Reform of the House of Commons Committee recently made recommendations on this topic.
The Lords committee said:
(Are the Lords listening? Creating connections between people and Parliament – Information Committee ).
The Commons committee said:
(Rebuilding the House – House of Commons Reform Committee)
I don’t know for sure, but I would imagine that these recommendations will lead to public participation focusing on the content of a Bill.
Hopefully the work that we are doing now on the presentation of a Bill (its explanatory notes and the Acts it affects) will help people understand the purpose of a Bill better and aid them when they come to comment on the content.
Thanks
Jackie
18/02/2010 at 7:43 pm
Nick Booth
Thanks Jackie – all sounds good to me!
20/02/2010 at 7:50 am
Dave Cockayne
This does seem to be a step forward as do the links provided by Jackie, but they all seem to fall well short of effective engagement in the process of crafting legislation and communicating the rationale to plebs like me.
I don’t understand a bill because I’m not a trained lawyer, it doesn’t matter how ‘accessible’ you make the bill, it’s still all greek to me.
I would prefer to see bills presented in wiki form so that I can see how they develop from start to finish.
I would prefer to have all bills presented with raison d’etre cover note explain why the bill has been proposed.
I would prefer the entire bill and all amendments to be presented in a fashion similar to this http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
each section of the bill having a human readable translation to the waffling lawyer stuff.
I would prefer to have hyperlinked or embedded rich media for each section of the bill so MP’s can explain and justify via video, audio, text, linked researched documents etc each section or ammendment.
This way at least I stand a reasonable chance of understanding what is going on!