Monday, May 30, 2011

No more board meeting transcripts?

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that for many months there has no new posting under the label "Board meeting", announcing imminent changes to the local administrative units, mostly upgrades of TAO to municipalities. There even were municipal upgrades lately which I only learned about by the announcement in the Royal Gazette - Ang Sila became town in March - or recently by a posting in the 2bangkok forum when Rangsit was upgraded to a city municipality.

The reason for this is simply that there are no new board meeting transcripts on the website of the Legal Affairs Bureau since September last year. I have no idea if making these was discontinued intentionally - which would be very sad - or more likely that the website has become neglected. There was a massive redesign of the website earlier this year, which gave the site a much more modern look, and even added useful things like a RSS feed, but apparently after the change to the new content management system nothing was done anymore. The webmaster even did not notice for weeks that the direct URL http://law.moi.go.th/ gave an empty page, and only by luck I found the correct internal link to see the page. To make it worse, I tried to notify the webmaster (and ask about those transcripts) by the contact page, and only response I got as a bounce email. So the only way I saw to notify was the forum of the website, but apparently that isn't read by anyone either. Another example of the impossibility to contact anyone in the administration online.

I waited a lot before turning into this rant mode, but I am really sad that all attempts to help the webmaster went into the big nothing, and there this good source of information has become quiet. I will of course continue to monitor the website, as well as reading the new RSS feed to see if anything pops up. If they come back, it will be a lot of work to to work through more than hundred transcripts at once, not one or two a week as I could do in past. But other departments are even worse - I really would love to have similar transcripts for the board of name changes, but even the agenda of the meetings is impossible to find online.

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