communication issues, part 2

So to get back to things getting me, what gets me is this: here we are sitting in this enormous meeting room, with two technocrats from each city government department expected to start working on this project right away, and one technocrat per department expected to show up at weekly meetings to discuss, present, and compile, from now until there is enough information to make it look like the mayor has actually accomplished something in his time in office, or the explicit beginning of the next presidential campaign, whichever comes first. And the question I have, which is supposedly the question I’ve been here answering all along but which I am actually still puzzled by, is: Why is it necessary? Why are all these people needed to compile lists of policies, policy implementation activities, and information on their results? Why does the city government not have access to its own information? We’ve determined that everything is, in the final steps at least, computerized; and we’ve determined that at least some information is regularly stored in relatively centralized, searchable locations. So you’d think that what would be involved in compiling information on policies, their implementation, and their obvious effects would be something less like having a trained professional city planner go around asking everyone to tell her what they've been up to for the last six years, and more like having some administrative assistants go into the machine and extract the information.

So, what is the information storage system that we’re working with then? Here’s how written history works in the department I’m in, from what I’ve seen. Aside from his computer, every administrator has a small notebook, softcover, bound in brown-paper-bag-like paper, in which he writes the information for each case he handles: the case number, the date it came to him, the title, the basic idea, what he did about it, and who he handed it to when he’d done it. This book stays on his desk, for his reference. So if I need to get at some document that he handled—for instance if I am a person from another department and I never got a copy of the meeting notes for which he was responsible—I can ask him about it.

He can look it up in his little book and tell me that the document was sent to my office last Tuesday and I should look around and see if anyone’s nabbed it; or he can go to his computer and find a piece of information in the document if I am looking for something less formal than the full final stamped and dated version; or he can even, god forbid, write down the case number and date on a piece of carbon paper, stamp it, take it to his section head to stamp again, and then give it to the "dragon lady" (direct citation, in English) who runs the archives on the eighth floor and see if one of her lackeys will find it for him, after which he can copy the relevant parts and return it to the dragon lady within the seven-day deadline. The other people who see the little book are the adminstrator’s immediate superiors, the guzhang, his little-group head (in charge of about 4-10 people), and the kezhang, his section head, for purposes of review: how fast did he handle his cases? How many cases did he handle? And so on. As far as I know the information in this book does not get entered into any kind of centralized or searchable format accessible to others, like a database. I may be wrong on this, and for some bizarre reason I haven't bothered to ask yet (tomorrow, really), but so far evidence points in that direction.

Technically, Taipei has pretty bright sunshine laws that allow even private citizens access to city government documents with a relatively simple process that is standardized across departments. In practice, as a student of a friend of mine determined in an informal but thorough study that was then passed on to me, every department has its own archive with its own rules, and documents are generally quite difficult to locate in the first place (in the sense of being able to tell the local dragon lady what you are looking for) and to get access to in the second (in the sense of getting her to actually hand them to you). The Department of Urban Development archives require the aforementioned carbon paper request form, preferably signed and stamped by the chengban ren, the accept-dealing-with-it person, that is, the (lowest-level) person in charge of the case, and then stamped by his section head. If someone does something crazy like die or change jobs or otherwise absent himself from the role he held when he accepted and dealt with the case in question, someone else in the section in which the case was handled can sign and stamp the carbonated request form, filled out with the number and date of the case, and take it to be stamped by the current head of that section. I’ve been told that, if the original chengban ren is still working in the department but is in another section, the dragon lady archivist insists that the request form bear his stamp, also. In any event, the form must have the number of the case. The number of the case is in the little softbound brown paper notebook belonging to the accept-dealing-with-it person.

Presumably when he dies or changes jobs, the notebook stays behind; so presumably someone somewhere would be capable of tracking down a document from, say, two years ago, by looking through all the pages of all the notebooks of all the people who worked in that section at that time, presuming that the person looking for the document knows the section in which the case was handled and the number or name of the case. Presumably he would also be able to ascertain from the titles of the cases which case was of interest to him even if he did not know the document number. However, I am currently translating the titles of the 100 major cases the department is currently working on into English. Aggravated calls by the coworker who is technically in charge of these translations to people in various sections asking them what the hell they mean by giving a case a name like that and how is Anya supposed to translate it when he can’t figure out what it means either lead me to think that perhaps one wouldn’t, necessarily, know which case one was looking for just from the title, even presuming one could find it on some page of a little notebook.