Currency, currency, currency

[muninnhuginn]

Not the stuff you can spend either

Background (1): A bit back, in the early nineties, the ravens flapped off to a tech. writing conference in The Netherlands about quality in technical documentation. The keynote speaker--Patricia Wright--interestingly and excellently summed up quality documentation in two words: "accuracy" and "timeliness".

Over the years, spending probably as much time reworking, updating and maintaining as generating new information, the ravens have come to the conclusion that there's another term that could be added: "currency". It's implicit, maybe, in the other two, but (and this is the nub of this entry) perhaps needs emphasizing--in some cases wrapped around a convenient brick.

We're cross.

Background (2): More recently (months, not years here), we were looking for ballet classes (for Looby Loo: the thought of the ravens' ungainly flapping in a leotard appalls). We, rather inevitably, started with a quick search of the Web. Found several pages with lots of info. on dance schools and classes. One class, quite new, was nearby and on a convenient date. Another ballet school held some of its classes at what is likely to be Looby Loo's primary school. (No email address for the latter. We used our least favourite means of communication: the 'phone. As ever, the "baby" classes weren't in town, but in a village hall outside the city. Even if we did drive, we wouldn't choose to drive out of Cambridge in the rush hour regularly.) We tried the former. It had an email address and no other contact details. We sent an email. It bounced. We fumed. We found another school, not the one we originally would have chosen: it's very traditional and on a Saturday morning. The annoyance was that lists of organizations and contacts, admittedly some created by private individuals, were regularly and woefully out of date. When this was "official" sites this struck me as unprofessional and reprehensible. We'd rather have no information than obsolete information.

Today, we thought we'd get information about renting an allotment: if there are no jobs forthcoming, an allotment near Looby Loo's school (neatly on the route to and from) would be a constructive thing to have. (Without sacrificing play area or shady seating area, there's really no more cultivable space in the garden.) The pages on allotments.net looked a little untended. We couldn't find any updates made since early last year. Still we crossed our claws and emailed the relevant person. The email bounced. We've sent a comment to the web site. Since we did this via a form, we won't know if it bounces. We bet it gets ignored. We do have a 'phone number, which hopefully isn't out of date.

We're really cross.

Granted, this is all stems from our overly picky and pedantic nature. The same part of our personality that makes us want to shove CDs M has failed to file alphabetically into whichever orifice would inflict most pain on him. The same part of our nature that, on scoring an empathy Quotient of 53 and a Systemizing Quotient of 52 in Simon Baron-Cohen's tests, was a little miffed that we hadn't got equal scores (which probably explains that extra point for the SQ). It may also be due to that decade of struggling to keep the information for which we were responsible current and therefore potentially useful to folk. If we generated information, we regarded it as a duty to keep it current and working. But, but, it doesn't strike us that we're being unreasonable. Are we?

Note to self/ves: Must periodically review links from LJ in case they're no longer valid. The Indy leader/comment ones are already less than useful for a start.

Now just don't get us started on forms design.

Comments

Update

[muninnhuginn]

Well, I got an email last night from the maintainer of the allotments web site. So the incorrect email will be fixed and we have confirmation that the phone number is valid. Which is good. (I realise there's a reason why I'm so sensitive about this--non 'net related.)

Oh and a suggestion that if I get an allotment I might want to help with the web site too. Quelle surprise!