Authorities change - how to track them across their histories

[pinkforest]

The below information can radically change on any authority

1. Dis-established with no replacement
2. Dis-established with replacement 1:1
3. Dis-established with partial replacement with some function/s not provided / done
4. Dis-established with replaced by multiple authorities
5. Amalgamated by joining several authorities and their functions together
6. Established - New function
7. Established - Partial new function or rebranding / spin of the function

It would be important to archive the past information about authorities and how they have evolved.

Given requests are relevant to given authority at given time there should perhaps be some type of curated history of them.

All requests to any given authority should be immutable and when authorities change new authority records should be changed vs moving previous requests to new authority to keep it properly archived relevant to historical authority and it's function / branding / public footprint etc.

[benrfairless]

This is an interesting idea that we haven't really documented.

We recently had a request to change the victorian Department of Transport and Planning. It was previously known as just the "Victorian Department of Transport".

Given the number of changes to an agency, would it be a good idea to create a new authority each time new responsibilities are added to it?