The NASS website
I've been digging around the National Assembly website. I'd heard on the radio that a Bill on Electronic Transactions is currently being debated. I managed to find it (pdf download) here.
Its impressive that in the top-right juicy spot there is an easy to use "Search Bills" drop-down menu. Even better, when you select a year, you are taken to a page of bills, each of which you can download. However, its a shame you are not told immediately the status of the Bill - first reading, second reading, date of next public hearing etc.
What is a bit odd is that all the Bills you find from this drop-down are Senate Bills. Where are the House Bills and how can you download them? When you dig around further and get to the House of Reps side of the site here, you get Bill progression. However, you are not able to download any PDFs. Again, typing in "Petroleum Industry Bill" into the main search field on the home page draws a blank. There's something wrong with the search functionality if one of the most significant pieces of draft legislation is not available on this site.
All in all, its a not a bad site, but it could be a lot better. A re-think on the information design would help, as would improving the search functionality. An archive of all legislation would be great too!
Posts
2 comments:
Now this is the attitude we need, people like you looking into what should be common knowledge (available to the public) and asking questions. Eventually such questions should lead, to more questions and in time action taken to rectify the situation. Problem is, with Nigeria, things don’t go that way. That is where things unravel, and no further action will be taken.
The fact that you couldn’t get any information on the petroleum bill, and you couldn’t check to see how far others had progressed. Would seem to indicate that this is could be a deliberate unwritten specification to the systems analyst(s) on the part of the client.
why the hansard. do we run a british parliamentary system?
Post a Comment