Attempting to teach parliamentary procedure to machines

Michael Smethurst

There’s no getting away from the fact that parliamentary procedure is pretty arcane and that modelling that procedure adds a still more arcane overlay. But this is a beautifully reflective post which wears deep expertise very lightly to share thinking which is relevant well beyond the immediate parliamentary context.

Two points which should resonate far beyond the Palace of Westminster are worth pulling out. One is that parliamentary processes may have some extreme characteristics, but they also have some characteristics which people involved with other kinds of information flows will instantly recognise. It may or may not be possible to express definitively how the system should work; for different reasons it may or may not be possible to capture in detail how it does work, particularly if that is in some circumstances indeterminate. But taking an almost anthropological approach to understanding systems is both an art form and an investment which needs to be made.

The second is that for all the power of starting with user needs, that is necessarily limited if some kinds of needs come into being only as a result of building a system which satisfies them. In a nice nod to George Box, the post ends with a bold claim for the art of system modelling:

The models are only ever maps, but if they’re good enough to be useful they can be useful in ways the map designers never considered. No amount of requirements gathering or user research will ever compensate for omitting the work on modelling, because user needs are emergent from use and emergent from materials.

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