The DobBlog is 1 year old today.
What have we achieved? Well, about 50,000 words on the state of the Irish Electoral Register, syndicated publication of an article based on those words in two International newsletters for IT/Business Intelligence professionals and a wordpress template I’m finally not unhappy with.
The electoral register is still buggered (that’s a technical term). The scrap and rework (as predicted) was inconsistent and hasn’t fixed the underlying problems. As soon as the clean up stopped, the register has begun to drift to inaccuracy again.
The Government continues to be cavalier about the issues involved in our electoral system… a number of constituencies will be under represented in the next Dail because of the failure of the Government to react to the population changes in the Census. That’s assuming the election can go ahead given the Constitutional challenge that has commenced.
The understanding of the importance of good quality information and well designed processes to gather and use that information has grown however amongst a small (and growing) group of occasional visitors to the blog.
Hopefully the next 12 months will bring enlightenment to Government on some of the issues I’ve blogged about this year and perhaps they will seek out good practices. Hopefully as well we will see some critical commentary in the media on these types of issue. I lost count of the number of pieces I submitted to Irish media during the year. My hit rate outside of Ireland this year is 2 for 2… domestically it is 0 for lots more.