Odd things going on this morning.

A visit to a few different blogs (Tim Worstall, Stumbling & Mumbling and Scott Adams’ Dilbert Blog)appares to be showing about a week’s worth posts have suddenly gone missing.

The last posts showing on any of these blogs are from the 9th & 10th December, yet I know there have been quite a few posts on all of them since then.

Strange…

UPDATE: Tim’s been on via the comments as follows…

The whole of Typepad is cocked.

They started maitenance at 10 pm PST yesterday. Looks like they’ve rather screwed it all up. An hour or two, but 8?

UPDATE 2

From Anil in the comments -

The TypePad blogs are showing old data because we had a failure in a storage system, and we decided to show cached data until the application is back online. We’re restoring the current data, and verifying that info takes time. In the meantime, updates are on status.sixapart.com or on our TypePad website.

A short while back I was approached by a member of SCEN’s community panel, which is effectively its governing body, about a problem they were having with obtaining information from officers.

It’s what should be a straightforward matter - since June 2002, SCVO has operated two local small grants programmes under the same government community empowerment programme of which SCEN is a part. In fact, these are actually SCEN’s grants programmes but SCVO have insisted, up until this last year, that they carry the SCVO ‘brand’ (as well as managing the staff and recruiting/appointing the grants panel which considers applications - and don’t get me started on the handling of appeals!)

What the panel member has been looking for, for the last couple of years, is simply a statistical breakdown showing who it is that’s actually benefitting from these grants - in general terms, where the money’s been going.

This would, you think, be pretty straightforward; it being the kind of monitoring you’d consider to be a matter of simple routine. But no, things are never quite that simple. Until the last year to 18 months it was near impossible to get hold of a geographical breakdown and to this day it has never been possible to get a full breakdown by ethnicity to see which local communities, especially minority communities, have been sccessful in getting funding.

The reason given for this all along has been that SCVO don’t record the information necessary to produce such a breakdown because Government Office West Midlands don’t ask for it - all they want to know is the proportion of funds going to BME groups overall, not a breakdown by specific communities. This is despite the fact that all other monitoring the organisation does is done as a full breakdown by specific communities.

So, panel members ask and always the reply comes back - can’t be done.

Except that’s not strictly-speaking true - SCVO may not record detail on ethnicity alongside applications for funding but that doesn’t mean that in the case of the vast majority of applicant groups it doesn’t hold information on their ethnicity - information which could, with a little effort, be cross-reference with records of applications and grants to generate the figures required…

Now, from what I hear on the grapevine, it seems there’s been a moan or two of late from some in SCVO about one or two of my previous posts where they contend that I’ve not got my facts straight.

Now, I’m not one to sidestep such a challenge, so as its clearly not enough to say that the figures the panel member has been looking for can be done then the onus is on me to prove it.

Which is why, if you click on this particular link, you’ll be able to download the very stats (.pdf) that SCVO claim can’t be produced, covering the period from June 2002 to January 2005 and a total of 466 application from just over 250 local organisations, broken down by town and by ethnicity.

So if you live in Sandwell and want to see, like the panel member in question, how just over £824,000 has been distributed to voluntary and community organisations over a two and half year period, just hit the link, fire up your acrobat reader and read away.