Culturenet - education promises ignored

Culturenet Cymru has failed to deliver on its promise to deliver topic packs for teachers by March 2005. It's nearly November and they still say 'Topic Packs are currently under development'

Perhaps the fact that Culturenet's Education Officer departed (along with the Office Administrator, the IT Manager, the Data/Web Officer...) explains the tardiness on this project; it doesn't explain why their published schedule hasn't been updated in the last seven months.

Culturenet: grinding to a halt

Culturenet Cymru have resorted to the reason of cowards - threats and smears

- Peter Black, Member of the Welsh Assembly

Culturenet Cymru is the publicly-funded body that brought you the faked and falsified 100 Welsh Heroes poll. Since its inception to date Culturenet has been given one and a half million pounds of taxpayers' money by the Welsh Assembly. What's it been doing recently with all that cash? Misleading us, certainly.

Culturent Cymru says it's working on a set of projects. Let's see how it's doing with the half a million pounds it was given for 2004-2005:

Culturenet Cymru's Schedule of Work

Task	Due	Remarks
adding 10 new books to the Books from the Past website	30/09/05	Fail - The website still has only the same 10 books it launched with
Add 3000 items to the 'Gathering the Jewels' website	October 2005	Impossible to tell - the website's links have been wrecked by staff at the National Library¹. Most of the existing links in Google and from other sites are now invalid. A return to the first year when the website was unusable. (update: site seems to have been put back) but all the same, there were the promised 3,000 items in the pipeline a year and a half ago and rather inventive arithmetic was being used even then
Add 'advice and guidance' and teachers' topic packs to Gathering the Jewels	March 2005	Fail - there are no teachers' topic packs available and no specific advice and guidance pages have been added
Communities Cymru	September 2005	Unknown - the website doesn't seem to have changed since January 2005, 2 months before this was included on the promised delivery list
Copyright Toolkit delivery	March 31st 2005	Fail - no sign of the tool, no announcement of completion
Ongoing digitisation	December 2006	No further information
Accessible version of the Cultured Cymru quiz	?	Fail - this website was bought from a Cardiff development company; although Culturenet ran website accessibilty seminars it obviously doesn't think the matter important, even though it has made a promise of delivery of an accessible site

In the light of this failure to deliver on just about everything it's probably a wise decision not to publish details of projects for 2005-2006. More alarmingly, the £250,000 from the Assembly Government for this year is supposed to include funding for a new 'specialised' management information system.

Culturenet's history of IT systems purchasing is abysmal, although an attempt to recoup money from a supplier, responsible for the first, unworkable incarnation of the Gathering the Jewels website was prevented, apparently because embarrassing questions might have been asked about project management - and after all, it doesn't matter if you're spending someone else's money.

¹ Gathering The Jewels URLs had been tidied up using a Win32 version of Apache's MOD_REWRITE - it looks like someone has taken over the website without understanding how this worked

Culturenet Cymru

Does anyone know what Culturenet Cymru has done with its half a million pounds from the Welsh Assembly?

What's wrong with elected officials

First, Simon Thomas plays to the gallery by trying to impeach Tony Blair. Now Alan Pugh goes for cheap populism by pushing for a review of the law on wearing and displaying Nazi regalia.

Meantime, the NHS in Wales goes down the pan and our economy remains a basket-case relying on mismanaged taxpayer subsidies. Great stuff.

Recently-published cabinet minutes reveal that "ministers discussed and agreed a proposal that members of the cabinet should give a presentation to London-based journalists on the achievements of the assembly government.

"There was a need for proactive rather than reactive communication of the assembly government's messages and ministers requested a list of ten key messages to be communicated."

[The BBC's Wales@Westminster weblog]

Getting to know your AM

Getting to know your AM, or arranging a meeting with them, might be difficult if you live in the consituency of Elin Jones. Her surgeries are held exclusively during working hours. For whose benefit do you imagine that arrangement is made?

Where would we be without it

Overheard:

Culturenet Cymru's contribution to Welsh culture has been immeasurable

Welsh Heroes - a fraud

The Chair of urenet Cymru - Andrew Green, the Head of the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth - said that the 100 Welsh Heroes Poll had been conducted properly and threatened the ex-IT Manager with legal action for 'defamation'.

The upshot now is:

There will be no legal action for defamation.

Culturenet Cymru accepts, 'there remains the possibility that such manipulation, that is, manipulation for purposes other than to combat 'fraud', was conducted'

How long has it taken Andrew Green to reach this position? We're all keen to see the correspondence between Mr Green and the Welsh Assembly.

Peter Black AM, who has taken an interest in this misspend of a considerable sum of taxpayers' money, declines to point the finger. So we will. The Marketing Department drove the fraud. knew all about it, and was the final authorisation for publishing the manipulated figures each week.

Someone's telling porkies.

Statistics to reveal Culturenet fraud

Culturenet Cymru will not make its 100 Welsh Heroes database available for public inspection. Perhaps there's another way to demonstrate that the figures are faked.

For example, out of the 100 finalists, there are 10 groups sharing exactly the same vote:

• one group of four nominees, all with 57 votes
• two groups of three nominees with 135 votes and 55 votes
• seven groups of two nominees with 158, 143, 120, 81, 68, 64 and 62 votes

This looks like the sort of pattern you might expect if there were far fewer votes, necessarily clustering around a smaller spread (especially at the lower end), with successive artificial boosts given week on week - and that's exactly what the ex-IT Manager says happened.

If anyone who knows enough stats would care to take a look at the figures? Failing that we'll have to do the analysis ourselves.