Thursday 14 October 2010

Website Fail

Quite large sections of NCC's website have been down for a week now. Basically, anything on the open.nottinghamcity.gov.uk directory seems to be inaccessible which includes all the minutes and agendas of council meetings and, of more interest to people who aren't obsessive anorakky bloggers, the jobs pages.

As far as all the minutes and stuff goes I realise that I'm probably the only person in the entire city who actually looks at them but publishing details about the council's comings and goings is an essential part of democracy and accountability. It's a mainstay of our society that people should have the RIGHT to look at them, even if they don't actually choose to bother.

And I'm already feeling sorry for the jobseeker who will finally get to look at sits vac whenever it's back only to see that her/his dream job is past the deadline for applications.

Come to think of it I'm already feeling sorry for anybody who thinks that their dream job is to be found at Nottingham City Council but that's not the point. There's a principle at stake here.

I eventually gave in and emailed asking what's wrong. However, the web manager either doesn't know or isn't allowed to tell me because he immediately copied me in to his email to the Head of IT Infrastructure asking him to respond to me instead. Who hasn't done so as yet.

Of course I know what they're up to really. They're trying to stop me blogging. Those minutes are the lifeblood of this blog. It's all about me you know. It is I tell you!....Now where's my tin foil hat?...

Addendum - Oh yes I forgot. It's 'Local Democracy Week'. Good way to celebrate, shutting down the democracy sections of your website.

Update 15/10 - It's back now

3 comments:

edjimf said...

To be fair to the webmaster, if NCC is anything like where I work, they won't have a clue what's wrong if it IS an infrastructure problem, like a broken server or router.

However, for a public authority website to be down for over a week is utterly unacceptable, esp. as it means I can't check the progress of my carriageway faults I logged yesterday :)

"Someone else's IT Infrastructure Manager"

Gumboil said...

Andy,
I have the same problem if I try to access using Firefox but not if I use Internet Explorer (version 6).

Phil

Andy said...

It does seem to be back now.