I discovered something today. It turns out the minutes and reports produced from meetings of the Licensing Committee of Birmingham City Council (where Osiris Licensing is based) are available online.
The relevant part of the council website is called Democracy in Birmingham. Here’s what the site looks like:
To find licensing reports:
- Select ‘Regulatory’ in the drop-down box for ‘Meeting Body Type’
- Choose either ‘Licensing Committee’ or one of Licensing Sub-Committees A to E
This is interesting to someone like me but there are a few immediately obvious problems with the setup here.
The information isn’t searchable. The text of all the documents is in PDF format, which isn’t searchable in the way that you might use Google to search for information.
I can’t subscribe to the information. If I want to receive every licensing report from the Birmingham licensing committees (and I do) then I’ll have to keep checking back on the website. This is a waste of time and effort when very simple technology (called RSS) exists to send that information to anyone at no cost as soon as it is produced.
The story is liekly to be similar in councils up and down the country. I imagine many websites were designed before RSS became commonplace (you can click the orange button to get free updates from this website using RSS – try it) but I believe making democratic information available should be an imperative.
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