Sunday, October 25, 2009

DPP website update: still offline

District Policing Partnership logo

At the end of September I mentioned in a post that the District Policing Partnership websites were no longer just not being updated, but were in fact totally offline.

Three and a half weeks later, and they’re still not online. And there’s still no mention of alternative contact details on the “temporarily unavailable” banner. (Google’s cache of the old Contact Us page will help if you need to contact them in the meantime!)

District Policing Partnership website down - no contact details on the holding page

My understanding is that as part of upgrading the old DPP website and moving it from its external host to run inside a NI Civil Service data centre, they ran into problems complying with the very strict security requirements for operating in this new environment.

Incredibly, it has taken well over a month to sort out the problem, on top of the website freeze of many months before that. Few commercial organisations would tolerate such a prolonged outage. While the world may not stop rotating with the unavailability of DPP information, as tax payers we are underwriting their funding.

And it all falls very short of the NI Policing Board’s own (April 2008) DPP Code of Practice that expects

Reports of Meetings in Public

... Not later than 7 working days after the report of the meeting in public of a DPP has been formally ratified, the report must be available on the DPP website

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