Agreed.

I already wrote that on the whiteboard for you. [laughs]

Hmm, you can just create a field with type JSON. Problem solved.

Like the Darwin information typing architecture.

The PDIS.tw team here wrote that for our meeting tracking systems.

From the revolution. It means that Excel is never storing our date formats natively.

Which is always the case here, by the way, because we start counting years from 1911 in the government.

Yeah, it’s like, "I don’t know what to do." This is like my XML messages. It’s like saying the starter tag is empty.

I know how hard it is. It’s just in the case of meeting logs, I was like, "No, it’s not worth spending that much time on it."

Reporting on the exact position when it goes wrong the user a helpful message is really difficult. I spent maybe a year with Larry Wall on that. [laughs]

Well, I know exactly how hard it is, because I did write a parser and error reporter for the Perl 6 language.

It’s right. I wrote the conversion script myself, and I didn’t do that well on the error reporting thing.

Then you see a broken XML message, a random message that says it’s invalid XML, basically, which is not helpful for the person. You have to click “back,” and then try to figure out where it’s wrong.

It’s like their GPS for quality.

I’m too optimistic. That’s great to know.

Five percent.

We handle that, too. Oftentimes, we pay for the cheaper option when we don’t care about the timecodes, which is most of the time, where they just paragraph delimit the speakers, and so on. Then we write a parser that translate it into a command console, and then feed it ...

Just to illustrate, basically, this is from the CastingWords folks. CastingWords is an external vendor. They have their own format. They can produce a VTT or an SRT, which would then timecode it with the YouTube.

Currently, it’s either completely blocked through some cryptic error messages, or it goes through.

Yes, I do agree, it’s an experience we need to work on.

When they hit publish, what we need to do is to have this very clear, instead of random XML error from SayIt.

Yeah.

It feels very automated; just start typing whatever. We put on a line of description that said, "Try to put a colon between the speaker and the words they speak." That’s it.

The Etherpad always starts with the date of the meeting, the title of the meeting, and then speeches.

We just gave them a template basically.

We write a parser.

Yeah.

An Etherpad link.

No. In PDIS usually just send her an Etherpad link.

Alice.

We outsource maybe most of our stuff.

...who do all the stuff in building systems. Correct me if I’m wrong, but all of the cases that I’ve seen, it’s an externally procured provider that’s renewed annually, that provides the user-visible experiences. Maybe the infrastructure, the actual machines are maintained by the IT department, but the IT are ...

Most of the time, it’s the private sector vendors...

In Taiwan it doesn’t work that way. [laughs] In Taiwan the “IT” people is just a part of the picture. Let’s put it lowercase, like “it”.

What matters is that whenever we want to do any data exchange in a normal way, there has to be either a hub in the meta-level, or a direction connection between these IT guys. Then the public servants are blissfully ignorant of it. That’s your picture.

Sure, of course. They would be in a larger IT office or something. In some cases they report directly to an upper level IT unit, sometimes they report to the organization, the command structure doesn’t matter here.

What we’re trying to do here is to... I was explaining the Taiwan situation a bit. I understand that there is usually an IT department in other countries, like in each siloed unit.

Yes.

Meeting logs are done in free text, mostly through emails and as Word documents in official document systems. Mostly printed in paper form and re‑scanned as JPEG files, if I’m not mistaken, or at best, as attachment to emails.

Meeting logs. That’s the primary example.

I don’t think that’s the case in Taiwan though.

...if it somehow invalidates.

Yeah. Other system depends on it. It would break...

Sure.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture.

This is the DITA idea back in the XML era.

Sure.

Which is our usual way of doing things.

Yeah. It’s the JSON Schema part.

...it is a good example anyway.