Outline
The United Nations is a system of international bodies constituted by the Governments of the world and established in June 1945 based in part on the structure of League of Nations for the following stated aims:
- To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind
- To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small
- To establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained
- To promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom
It has two central political bodies, the General Assembly and the Security Council, each which hold official meetings, publish transcripts of those meetings, hold votes cast in the names of its member nations, and pass resolutions. There are many other important bodies, committees and agencies, but these two are the least scrutinized because they are essentially sovereign.
Documents
Like many political institutions, the United Nations is a complex paper-shuffling bureaucracy with its Committee on Information, Ad-Hoc Working Group on Informatics, and manage the truly astounding challenge posed by multi-lingualism. Until recently, the only access a citizen had to what was going on at the United Nations was by either attending open meetings in person, reading about it in the press or in newsletters circulated by NGOs, or finding the information in one of the many Depository Libraries scattered across the world.
The United Nations has circulated its paper documents in electronic form in PDF files among its offices for many years. Since the main-streaming of the internet, many of these documents have been on-line and available to the public from it's website through a disorganized system of index pages, such as General Assembly Resolutions adopted during the thirteenth session.
Unfortunately, these hyper-links refer to temporary URLs which only work for a single computer at a time. For example, the Question of the representation of China in the United Nations (resolution 1239(XIII)) links on my computer to
http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/746/83/IMG/NR074683.pdf?OpenElement
and this link won't work on yours. This means that, while it is technically possible for some people to find these documents, it is impossible to share these documents by posting links on the internet.
However, by using a system of internet mirroring, it is possible to work round this problem and provide a generic link such as http://www.undemocracy.com/A-RES-1239(XIII).pdf.
Tutorial
There are three types of webpage here: index pages, parsed transcripts, and PDF documents.
The index pages contain various lists of links to documents. This type includes the front page, the seach pages, the page showing the list of documents for one year, and the count of documents on the system for all years. Also, you have a list of nations, and a page for each nation listing their minority votes and ambassadors, allowing you to link to all the speeches by one person speaking for that country. Additionally, there are the rather crude Security Council meetings by topic, and General Assembly topics for a year, which need more work done on them.
The parsed transcripts refer to the web pages for each General Assembly and Security Council discussion since 1994. This is where the speakers and votes are annotated and marked up. In many ways, these pages are what justify the entire project. General Assembly meetings sometimes contain numerous separate discussions on the same day, separated by "Agenda" titles, while Security Council meetings are on one subject at a time.
Finally, there are the unprocessed PDF documents, which include resolutions, reports, and official letters. There is also one such file for each parsed transcript. These resolutions, reports and other documents tend to be laid out in a variety of ways making them more difficult to process into structured HTML, like the transcripts. The advantage of the transcripts is that there are over three thousand of them all in the same format, so it's worth writing a special program. They also contain all the votes and links to many important documents.
To help make use of PDF documents there are three types of web-page. The first is the cover page, listing all the places in the parsed transcripts which link to it, as well as -- sometimes -- a preview image of the number of pages. If you choose, you can view the document in its native PDF form by clicking on the "Original Document" link. Alternatively, you can see the document page by page and highlight parts of it using the "add new highlight" and "consolidate highlight" links; for example this page. This will make it possible to cross reference key passages that may be buried within very long documents.
Electronic format
It should be noted that there is more to using the power of information technology than simply posting facsimiles of documents on-line. You have to make them searchable and allow for tabulations of data drawn from many of those documents. While the Governments know very well what way their delegates voted in the General Assembly or Security Council (since they wrote the instructions), the citizens don't have access to this list.
Here is an example of a recorded vote. Only by scanning though all the documents and seaching for the name of your country is it possible to recover this information.
However, once these documents are in a structured processed form (not PDF copies of paper documents) it is possible to use software to access the information and allow for citizens to directly find out what their country has been doing there.
It appears that, while many of the pre-1994 United Nations documents are bitmap scans embedded in a PDF file, later ones contain character information which can be extracted using a piece of free software called PDFTOHTML.
The result is a file containing the pixel positioning of each word as it appears on the page, for example:
<text top="902" left="122" width="327" height="14" font="6"><b>The President </b><i>(interpretation from French)</i>: None</text> <text top="920" left="90" width="358" height="14" font="1">the less, I should like to endorse strongly the practical</text> <text top="938" left="90" width="358" height="14" font="1">suggestion made at previous sessions that each delegation</text> <text top="956" left="90" width="358" height="14" font="1">designate someone to be present at the scheduled time. I</text> <text top="974" left="90" width="358" height="14" font="1">sincerely hope that all delegations will cooperate in this</text> <text top="992" left="90" width="42" height="14" font="1">regard.</text> <text top="109" left="512" width="12" height="14" font="1">In</text> <text top="109" left="543" width="60" height="14" font="1">paragraph</text> <text top="109" left="621" width="19" height="14" font="1">11,</text> <text top="109" left="659" width="18" height="14" font="1">the</text> <text top="109" left="695" width="47" height="14" font="1">General</text> <text top="109" left="761" width="67" height="14" font="1">Committee</text> <text top="127" left="481" width="347" height="14" font="1">recommends to the General Assembly that delegations</text> <text top="145" left="481" width="347" height="14" font="1">should be reminded of the utmost importance of</text> <text top="163" left="481" width="71" height="14" font="1">punctuality.</text> <text top="163" left="566" width="262" height="14" font="1">May I take it that the General Assembly</text> <text top="181" left="481" width="194" height="14" font="1">approves that recommendation?</text> <text top="218" left="512" width="111" height="14" font="5"><i>It was so decided.</i></text>
Once this has been done, it takes a good many days of hacking work using the very effective text processing capabilities of Python and fixing many of the invisible typos to develop a program (free software and available here) which can process it into a structured form like:
<div class="spoken" id="pg002-bk08"> <h3 class="speaker"> <span class="name">The President</span> <span class="language">French</span> </h3> <p id="pg002-bk08-pa01">None the less, I should like to endorse strongly the practical suggestion....</p> <p id="pg002-bk08-pa02">In paragraph 11, the General Committee recommends to the General Assembly that...</p> </div> <div class="italicline" id="pg002-bk09"> <p id="pg002-bk09-pa01">It was so decided.</p> </div>
This then is amenable to the website generating tools and can be used to generate many of the capabilities that we should expect from online information, such as searchability and automatic hyperlinks.
Ideally, a bureaucratic organization such as the United Nations would migrate away from paper and conduct its business using structured data without reference to the printed documents. Unfortunately, this us unlikely to happen any time soon because everything has to change.
Purposes
This website is a resource for public researchers who contribute to wikipedia, blogs, and other community discussion forums where citizens inform themselves and eventually hold their Governments to account. It has no association, formal or informal, with the United Nations or any other political group or NGO. As such, it is independent of the unspoken constraints put upon such organizations never to criticize or enable the criticism of the Governments on which their existence depends.
Serious critique is possible from outside the system by groups such as Global Policy and scholarly studies such as How Much Is a Seat on the Security Council Worth? Foreign Aid and Bribery at the United Nations, and by citizens of their country who find out what's being done in their name and take their Governments to task for it. You can write a letter to the ambassador from your country and ask them to explain why they voted in a particular way if you don't undestand what it means.
This project has been created by the people behind Public whip. Email team@undemocracy.com for details. Some commentary about how it was moved forward can be found on the Freesteel blog. It is sporadically under development as a spare time activity.
To do
Make http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:UN_document work in all cases, esp fix the Link to This javascript.
Get short sc meeting names into the meeting pdfinfo files, and use it widely.
General Assembly topics should span years and be tidy.
Secret SC meetings should be labelled.
Parsing work on countries attending SC meeting.
XML hacking to get all presidents labelled with correct country in September sessions.
Julian Todd, 21 July 2007
