13 Mar Geeks Try to Fix the U.N.
Or something like that.
The UN has for some time made copies of its resolutions and other information online at un.org, but like a lot of government initiatives the data published is hardly reusable in any meaningful way. URLs are not persistent, and data formats are not open.
A small group led by Julian Todd, a “civil hacker” in Liverpool is seeking to change all that by laboriously scraping the data out of the site and republishing it with persistent URLs. That way, even if the UN removes the information it will be retained in Google caches or the Wayback Machine at the internet archive (archive.org). The site also links through to other decisions and debates.
The name of the site is U.N. Democracy. It looks like a great resource, although one wonders why the U.N. couldn’t do this themselves.
It does appear, as noted at the Law Librarian Blog, that at least the UN is making an effort to better disseminate statistical data: http://data.un.org/Default.aspx
Maybe the UN would be in a better position to provide this resource itself if Members paid their dues?
Perhaps their costs would be lowered if they didn’t have to render most of their documents into a ridiculous array of languages.
Maybe the UN doesn’t want to be user-friendly or have an easily accessed trail of their docs and data?
What do they have to gain or lose?
Of course, there is always this …
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Robert Heinlein
Can someone please do this also with the USCIS website?