Thursday, June 29, 2006

Home Office: Burying the news every month

Dan "d-squared" Davies:
Tomorrow is the last Thursday of the month, a date upon which it is traditional for the Home Office to dump a heap of undifferentiated output from its research department on the world. It is suspected by many, including me that this practice is carried out in order to make it more difficult for there to be adequate scrutiny of the Home Office's performance, because there is limited analytical resource available to have a look at these things before the story goes cold.

That's the idea behind the Nightcap Syndication Research Thursday Project, which I am plugging here again. All Comment is Free readers and contributors (subject obviously to a baseline requirement of "knowing what you're talking about") are invited to have a look at the Home Office What's New page early doors tomorrow, pick a document that looks interesting to you and write a couple of hundred words about the main themes. I will be posting my piece on Comment is Free, my own blog and on the Nightcap site. If we can get a decent summary and a few bits of rough analysis of all the major documents up early enough in the day, it ought to make it much easier for the interesting pieces of research to get the publicity they deserve.
Swamped at work, can't do it this month nor next, but it's a great idea. If the Home Office would follow the example of the other departments and stop burying all the stats on one day, it wouldn't be needed. But as it's "not fit for purpose" and this easily fixed problem still hasn't been done, we need to highlight the issue. So, if you've time this fine morning, go here and join in.

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