What's wrong with Wales

Culturenet - education promises ignored

2005-10-29T19:33:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-26T20:16:00.000-07:00

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

2005-01-29T08:22:00.000-08:00

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

What's wrong with elected officials

2005-01-16T15:33:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-13T17:08:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-13T15:04:00.000-08:00

Overheard:

Culturenet Cymru's contribution to Welsh culture has been immeasurable

Welsh Heroes - a fraud

2004-11-18T02:32:00.000-08:00

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

2004-10-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

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.

Pants on fire

2004-10-28T01:59:00.000-07:00

Andrew Green, Chair of Culturenet Cymru, has been trying to explain the 100 Welsh Heroes to Simon Thomas MP. Unfortunately, Andrew has failed to grasp what happened; we're sure he wouldn't deliberately lie to an MP.

Andrew Green says,

It is entirely true that a manual programme (sic) was developed which was usd to add and subtact votes in the running of the 100 Welsh Heroes poll ... it was used o input in excess of 4,0000 postal votes and to discount votes that contravened the rules

Andrew Green is getting very confused. The contractors who delivered the first two 100 Welsh Heroes websites (the nomination and the voting sites) did indeed supply a browser-based tool to manage postal votes. But the program written by the ICT Manager for the voting phase added and subracted percentages of votes cast and could not be used to input individual postal votes

Andrew Green goes on to say,

With regard to the specific allegation about votes cast for Cayo Evans being ignored, we can assure you that this allegation is completely without foundation

This is simply incorrect. Votes for Cayo Evans were discounted.

Andrew Green has copied his letter to the Acting Director of Culturenet, Leith Haarhoff. We expect Mr Haarhoff, after talking to the Marketing Manager of Culturenet Cymru, will get back to Andrew Green and explain how Simon Thomas has been misled.

Show us the database, Andrew Green.

Culturenet Cartoon

2004-10-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

We're watching the new website about the sacking at Culturenet Cymru with great interest.

And here's a cartoon that goes along with it nicely (click on the thumbnail for a full-sized image).

Control of the National Library

2004-10-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

What do the websites Cymru ar y We, which seems unable to follow its own rules for content inclusion; and 100 Welsh Heroes, which cost about £150,000 and fiddled the resuls of its online poll have in common?

They're both based in the National Library of Wales and both are overseen by the Librarian of the National Library.

Now the National Assembly is making noises about taking direct control of the Library (which recently made the news over the theft of maps) . Sounds like a good idea to make sure the money is managed a little better.

Hi-Tech Wales : a publicly-subsidised call centre

2004-09-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

300 call centre jobs part paid by public grant aid. Fantastic. There's a future in which we can feel proud.

Culturenet Cymru again

2004-09-22T03:52:00.000-07:00

Everyone's still waiting for Culturenet Cymru's lawyers to get in touch with their ex-IT Manager. According to the Western Mail in July a spokesperson for Culturenet said:

This is a serious slur on both the integrity of Culturenet Cymru's staff and management and of the Assembly Government itself. Culturenet Cymru is now taking legal advice on its position.

It's now September and nothing's been heard from them. Make of that what you will.

On a related note we understand that Alan Pugh's department has sent a letter to Culturenet asking for clarification on a few points; one question being asked of Culturenet is exactly what steps were taken check on the charge that the 100 Welsh Heroes poll had been fixed when they were first asked about it by Alan Pugh.

Cymru ar y We

2004-09-12T03:03:00.000-07:00

Cymru ar y We (CAYW) is a publicly-funded website (money courtesy of the Welsh Assembly) that claims to be an authoratative guide to reliable websites that have to do with Wales.

Unsuprisingly, the site's difficult to use and the content is patchy. For example, from the English FAQ page here's the HTML behind the email link for people who wish to get in touch with CAYW):

<a href="mailto:">email</a>

Which is no use at all - if you try to take the email link your mail client will pop up with no email address filled in.

The alternative offered is to use the feedback form. Again, the link doesn't work:

http://www.walesontheweb.org/cgi-bin/feedback/en

CAYW seems to be a little less reliable than the websites it lists. Its pages don't validate ( try the FAQ page, or the home page or a random content page) for a variety of reasons, sometimes trivial but sometimes a bit more fundamental, like using the invald target attribute in links (it's invalid in XHTML 1.0 strict, which is what the pages claim to be) so that a new browser window is popped up.

Perhaps the mistakes aren't too awful but they demonstrate the website hasn't been checked properly.

What about the content? The criteria for inclusion seem baffling. For example, the validation page says, Wales on the Web does not provide access to websites that exist purely for commercial reasons but it includes links to Cardiff Airport, Llangollen Canal tours and the website of the Western Mail to name a few. Take one entry in its database, the website of Tinopolis. Tinopolis is the sixth largest independent television production company in Britain (according to its website). It's a commercial organisation. What's it doing on CAYW? Anyone know?

CAYW pushes itself as a validated, authoratative source of links, challenging the rationale behind search engines like Google that build in recommender systems through their ranking algorithms. I think I'd trust Google over three people sitting in the National Library of Wales to do the job properly.

Good use of taxpayers' money? I don't think so.

RSS: when?

2004-09-05T02:12:00.000-07:00

From scripting.com:

Fact check. The NY Times has had RSS since 20th March 2002

From the Welsh Assembly's go-ahead Cymru Ar-Lein:

At this stage, however, Cymru Ar-lein is not in a position to do more than monitor the rise in popularity of both RSS and Weblogs. While keen to embrace and promote appropriate new technologies both within the National Assembly for Wales and throughout Wales as a whole. Cymru Ar-lein must move at a pace which is feasible for our customers.

Culturenet: not quite right

2004-09-04T11:35:00.000-07:00

As our first entry on this website we have an interview with the ex-IT Manager of Culturenet Cymru. He has a few things to say about how the 100 Welsh Heroes poll was rigged and chats more about the sorry state of publicly funded websites in Wales.

WotW – What were Culturenet Cymru's websites like when you started work with them?

DJ – there was only the one website, 'Gathering the Jewels' (GTJ), which they'd inherited from an earlier project funded by NOF. It was appallingly bad but to be fair to Culturenet, that was understood.

WotW – What was wrong with this 'GTJ' site?

DJ – It basically wasn't a website. The HTML didn't validate, the CSS didn't validate, it was terribly difficult to navigate around, it didn't take on board any accessibility criteria and although it was supposed to have been designed to be usable in Netscape 4, it looked appallingly bad. The site was getting about 5,000 page requests per month

The original 'Gathering the Jewels'

WotW – So what did you do about it?

DJ – I abandoned the cumbersome Java-based front end, reverse-engineered the database (we had no support from the developers for that), created a few stored procedures and slapped on a very simple PHP-based interface. It wasn't pretty but it was quick.

WotW – What was the result?

DJ – We increased page requests from 5,000 to 460,000; we managed to hit accessibility requirements (W3C level AA); and we were able to ditch the previous reliance on the website developers.

WotW – Did you get any money back from the developers?

DJ – No, that's one of my bugbears. The website, as it stood, was godawful but I was told that I should not try to claw any money back from the contracted developers.

WotW – Why was that, if the site was so bad?

DJ– I think there are two reasons. The company seemed to have a difficulty working in a commercial environment with proper contract management and I think some people responsible for the project in the past felt they might be blamed and didn't want to make it too obvious that there'd been a bit of a blunder.

I found that suprising because there'd been a clear acceptance to begin with that the web delivery aspect of the project hadn't been particularly well-managed.

Project review is a part of the project management cycle but if you're used to working in a commercial environment I think you very quickly understand that it's more important to work out what's gone wrong and to control costs than it is to apportion blame.

WotW – Moving on to 100 Welsh Heroes: was the poll rigged?

DJ – Well of course it was. It was a marketing-led project from the start and I'm afraid marketing often has little to do with either Culture or truth. It was a project to establish the name of Culturenet Cymru.

To my mind it always seemed a very expensive way of doing that. We had about a half a million from the Welsh Assembly and around half of that half of was spent on the wage bill so a project costing, it's reported, £150,000 needed extraordinary justification. I think that's why the defence of it has been so vitriolic, personal and beside the point.

WotW – Culturenet Cymru seems to have told the Culture Minister, Alan Pugh, that the poll wasn't rigged.

DJ – Yes, I'm suprised by that. I can see the point of trying to keep it a secret but once the truth is out I can't understand defending the original position.

WotW – That it was a legitimate poll with everything above board?

DJ – Precisely.

Alan Pugh says the Welsh Heroes poll was Ok.

WotW – So what actually happened?

DJ – Voting went on throughout the week but the figures on the website were normally updated only once a week - usually on Monday afternoons. Obviously, that schedule was created so that we could spend each Monday morning fiddling the figures before publication.

I was asked to sort out a way of fixing the votes so I wrote a program to adjust the week's pending votes by a percentage or an amount agreed with other staff. So that we wouldn't arouse too much suspicion, the program could add imaginary votes across the board to the 100 nominees and then we could adjust up or down selected nominations.

For example, if legitimate votes over a week for Phil Campbell of Motorhead had pushed him into a leading position then instead of discounting too many of the votes and alerting his fans to our fiddle we could discount some and increase everyone else's by a sufficient amount to keep him in a lower position.

When we were content with the numbers - and that would be a Marketing call - we'd update the website.

WotW – Did it ever go wrong?

DJ– One Monday, yes. I was on holiday, we'd agreed the vote-fiddling beforehand and I'd written a routine to update automatically using the rigged figures we'd agreed upon. I didn't test it thoroughly before I disappeared to Venice and the site went down.

WotW – Were the final published figures very different from the real votes?

DJ – Yes, very different. If I remember rightly, Tom Jones was the real winner and that Motorhead guitarist was in with a shout. Mike Peters, the Alarm frontman, was there too.

WotW – So why did you adjust the figures?

DJ – Oh, a number of reasons, largely to do with marketing the project as a sensible use of public funds.

We were told that Cayo Evans would go down badly with the Welsh Assembly so we made sure he didn't figure in the top 20. To make the poll seem less low-brow we dropped the positions of entertainers. And in the last week of voting someone at the National Museum of Wales got into trouble for lobbying for Owain Glyndwr so the Nye Bevan / Owain Glyndwr positions were keenly examined.

WotW – And how could this vote rigging be demonstrated?

DJ – Two simple SQL queries. One to report on the votes table to show that a large number of votes had been discounted. Another to show the number of votes all mysteriously posted with the same spurious email address at the same time on a Monday morning.

It would be an easy thing to demonstrate but the Culture Minister, Alan Pugh, seems confident nothing untoward has happened. I don't know how he's comfortable with that position.

WotW – And what about now? What are you up to now?

DJ – Following the Assembly Online website and the mentions in Wired Magazine and from Jeff Zeldman, I'm picking up lots of work in accessibility and usability.