Show note based on a public body's tags

[robinhouston]

[Imported from https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow/issues/13, reported by TomSteinberg on January 12, 2011]

The original issue had no text & the following comments:

RichardTaylor commented May 30, 2011
We already can add public notes to the authorities.

What would be useful is the ability to add text to all bodies with a particular tag. For example then we could keep the standard bit of text we add to Housing Associations in one place rather than replicating it manually over all the Housing Associations. We could also write a note about say the kind of information a police authority would be expected to hold, and have that automatically appear on every police authority's page.

confirmordeny commented June 10, 2011
By way of an update we have started adding descriptions for some of the bodies on the site: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/list/hasdescription

The Twiki has guidance on writing good concise descriptions so we should get some consistency and over time the quality of descriptions should improve.

RichardTaylor commented November 25, 2011
I have posted a related Alaveteli issue at:

https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/issues/296

confirmordeny commented November 25, 2011
Richard
Good issue. I think I could slightly more myself when adding new
bodies even within the constraints of the current set up. You are
right though to put this forward.

regards,

John

[confirmordeny]

see also: http://foiwiki.com/foiwiki/index.php/WhatDoTheyKnow_Policy:Authority_descriptions

[crowbot]

Closing this as it doesn't currently seem to be a development issue. Please re-open if wrong.

[RichardTaylor]

This was intended as a development issue.

Take for example:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/list/housing_association

Currently we have manually put similar public notes in for each housing association (varying if Scottish or not). If we could add a note which appears whenever a body is tagged with a certain tag we could enter such notes once.

In this case a link we use has disappeared from the web, so we ought update all these notes. The tag specific note requested here would mean this update could be done via one (or two given Scotland) edits rather than over a hundred.

I can envisage we might similarly want to add a note to all schools, or Police and Crime Commissioners, in this manner if Alaveteli had this feature.

[kingqueen3065]

this is still very much desired

[RichardTaylor]

I just added a note to all 11 Northern Ireland local councils; they're all tagged

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body?tag=ni_local_council

it would have been good to be able to add the note to all of them at once.

I'll retitle this issue to reflect the proposed new feature.

While adding the note I wondered how notes are shown to those using the batch request feature; drawing such requestors' attention to, for example in this case that NI local councils have different responsibilities than local councils generally do in the UK might be useful and responsible.

[RichardTaylor]

This is the more general case of #296 which specifically refers to "Notices on request/body pages based on authority tags eg. foi_no and eir_only bodies"

[crowbot]

While adding the note I wondered how notes are shown to those using the batch request feature; drawing such requestors' attention to, for example in this case that NI local councils have different responsibilities than local councils generally do in the UK might be useful and responsible.

I've added a ticket in the pro repo to cover this

[RichardTaylor]

We currently have an issue on WhatDoTheyKnow where we'd like to update the notes for all bodies tagged housing_association following a tribunal ruling. This feature would have been desirable to deal with this situation.

[RichardTaylor]

There may be a work-round involving downloading the csv file of all authorities (which includes Tags and Public Notes), editing the spreadsheet, and re-uploading.

[mdeuk]

There may be a work-round involving downloading the csv file of all authorities (which includes Tags and Public Notes), editing the spreadsheet, and re-uploading.

This is generally what I do for bulk updates of this type - it works similarly well for tag changes / case normalisations.

[RichardTaylor]

A district council has written to ask WhatDoTheyKnow to do more to advise users that requests relating to things their county council is responsible for should be made to the county council.

If we tagged district and county councils separately, and if we had the feature proposed here, we could add notes to all bodies in each group offering advice.

[garethrees]

Would be good to be able to link up e.g. What information might be requested from a coroner? to the coroners_office tag.

[garethrees]

Recently had a request to add NHS 111. Turns out 111 is more of a template service that individual NHS bodies then implement according to local conditions. We might want to tag authorities nhs111 and note that they're the ones to ask 111-related questions to (e.g in Wales it's currently the Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust, but elsewhere it might be a CCG or other ambulance service).

[RichardTaylor]

On WhatDoTheyKnow we've started adding text such as

You should not use our service to contact this body with any customer service enquiries - find out why.

to certain public body pages - where the body is one which deals with lots of customers.

Ideally such text would be stored, and be editable, in one place, and then appear on a body's page where there was an associated tag eg. no_customer_service or .. or note:customer_service for example.

[RichardTaylor]

Recently had a request to add NHS 111. Turns out 111 is more of a template service that individual NHS bodies then implement according to local conditions. We might want to tag authorities nhs111 and note that they're the ones to ask 111-related questions to (e.g in Wales it's currently the Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust, but elsewhere it might be a CCG or other ambulance service).

I've added a category for organisations running ("providing") the 111 service for certain areas, and have ensured it is comprehensively populated.

mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme#964

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/list/nhs111

[RichardTaylor]

This feature could perhaps be used to add images to body pages based on tags. See #6586

[RichardTaylor]

From @FOIMonkey [originally posted to the wrong issue]

Presumably we'd be able to use this to bulk prettify things by adding images to the notes as we've been doing today?

[RichardTaylor]

I expect we would want to show any notes related to the tag on the page for listing members of a category associated with that tag.

ie. Any note we add to every Ambulance Service should also be shown at:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/list/ambulance_service

I'm not entirely sure there aren't notes that we'd only want on the overall listing page though. While it's not a text based note, if one was to have a map of Ambulance Services in the UK you might want that on the category page, but not necessarily repeated on each individual body page.