Well, well, well. Remember the 100 Welsh Heroes poll a while back? Organised by Culturenet Cymru and funded by the Welsh Assembly Government? It’s been alleged, by David Jones – the guy who implemented the voting system, that the whole thing was a fix – and a pretty egregious one. Firstly, the “frivolous” votes were scaled down – perfectly valid votes for Tom the Voice, Mike “Alarm” Peters and Phil “Motorhead” Campbell were removed, so the project wouldn’t come off as looking daft – the whole point of it was to promote Culturenet Cymru, not to actually find out who people thought the Welsh heroes were, so they didn’t want any riffraff in there.
Secondly, and rather more seriously,
we were told that the Ministry wouldn’t countenance [Owain] Glyndwr beating [Aneurin] Bevan; and we were trying to ensure funding for a third year so we fell into line.
So the voting was adjusted to make sure Bevan won. Another figure who suffered at the hands of the rigging was the Wales Free Army leader Cayo Evans:
We were told that Cayo Evans would go down badly with the Welsh Assembly so we made sure he didn’t figure in the top 20. To make the poll seem less low-brow we dropped the positions of entertainers. And in the last week of voting someone at the National Museum of Wales got into trouble for lobbying for Owain Glyndwr so the Nye Bevan / Owain Glyndwr positions were keenly examined.
(Diolch yn fawr, Nic!)
News story here, interview with the chap with a lot more detail on how the fix was supposed to have been done here. On the one hand, Culturenet Cymru are standing by their database, claiming that Jones was dismissed for gross misconduct and has been arrested for harrassing staff at CC (and released without charge, incidentally); but on the other hand they’re not releasing the database and program for independent analysis as Jones has asked…
[Update: it seems to be the considered opinion of people who know a lot more about this than me (cheers Dan, Nic) that it looks like the man's a self-publicising goit who enjoys interviewing himself. Clever. More on Dan's site and in the comments for this entry]
I’m starting to have my doubts about this – not about his central points (though it’s difficult to see how this poll could *not* have been fixed – there are people on maes-e happily admitting to having voted 100 times for Glyndwr, for example). The thing that’s worrying me is that the two blogs pushing this story look like they’re Jones’ handiwork, and that he’s "interviewing" himself to boost the story’s profile.
Which seems to be working…
Of course they are his handywork. Both the walesontheweb blog (and thank you so much for chosing my proje ts name for your blog mr Jones), and the welshassembly blog are his handywork. Have you taken a good look around the Wikis too? They make fantastic reading about David Jones and the trail of destruction he leaves in his wake across the country.
Sorry I should have backed that up with some form of evidence.
Firstly, try googleing for "Andrew Meekings" … Nothing. That in itself is suspect. Then ask yourself who in their right mind cares so much about David Jones getting the sack for gross misconduct that they wrote a fansite blog about it…. twice!
I’d recomend going back and reading the history on cloudsoup.com but alas David changed his blogging software every week and never backs it up. All the juicy articles have been removed though as he was required to take them down by his employers at the time.
I should express at this point that these are my personal views and not those of my employer in any way shape or form.
Thanks for all that… I’d just got as far as googling for Andrew Meekings myself and thinking "oh, hello, that’s suspicious." Of course, he’s clever enough not to buy a domain for the Meekings blog; if he did he’d have to use his real name for the whois.
I’m currently wondering what the gross misconduct he got fired for was, since according to CC it had nothing to do with the poll.
I couldn’t possibly comment but ask the walls, most of them know around Aberystwyth ;)
Funny looking back at all this 5 years on. The reason for the sacking was verbal abuse of a menber of the team, and hacking into the email accounts of other team members. He believed that others in the team were plotting against him and got increasingly volatile and aggresive in work. He was suspended and then sacked by the Head of the Library. He has kept a pretty low profile since.
Interesting. Blimey, I’d forgotten all about this. I hope I don’t stir him up again…
Sorry, Dan, didn’t mean to step on the toes of your website,
http://www.walesontheweb.org
If you want to know exactly why David Jones got fired, why not email him and ask him? I’m sure you could work out his eamil address.
Incidentally, David (for I’m pretty sure it’s you, paranoid rantings and all) I find it rather odd that you write a nice, polite comment about Dan’s site here; and then immediately afterwards write a long article slogging it off in your blog. It looks like the process went something like this:
Dan: Oi, you’ve nicked my website name!
David (to Dan): Have I? Oh dear. I’m terribly sorry.
David (shouts): Hey, everyone! Dan’s website is shit!
I’m not attacking your point of view, by the way; you make a lot of valid points. It’s just that your political skills are.. well, frankly dreadful – so bad that your attitude is tainting your views and making them seem less valid than they are.
I was pointing out a few problems with an taxpayer-funded website. It doesn’t belong to Dan. Then again, if he’d like to lay claim to the odd navigation, missng links and invalid markup that’s ok by me and perhaps he’d care to fix them. But I’m sure he isn’t responsible for the confusion of purpose and policy.