Ryan Blair, a technologist with the New York State Senate, thinks it could even give citizens a way to fork the law — proposing their own amendments to elected officials. A tool like GitHub could also make it easier for constituents to track and even voice their opinions on changes to complex legal code. “When you really think about it, a bill is a branch of the law,” he says. “I’m just in love with the idea of a constituent being able to send their state senator a pull request.”<p>-------<p>I find this quote fascinating. This would be fantastic if it actually gained traction. It would democratize the process of actually writing a bill. People could actually vote for/against sections for inclusion.
Gah, why would they use a bar chart for the "Getting Into Github" diagram and then not stick to anything resembling a consistent x-axis - at first it looked like it might be exponential, but it's not even that. The bar sizes are nearly meaningless, because different segments of them are to wildly different scales. All it actually conveys is "this one is more than this one".
Is it just me or are there a lot of errors in this article? Scott Chabon?<p>I wonder if they intentionally did that so people would fork the article and fix it.
"The old regime “makes it very hard to start radical new branches because you generally need to convince the people involved in the status quo up-front about their need to support that radical branch,” Torvalds says. “In contrast, Git makes it easy to just ‘do it’ without asking for permission, and then come back later and show the end result off — telling people ‘look what I did, and I have the numbers to show that my approach is much better.’”"<p>Substitute "business" for branch and "startup" for git.<p>Startups are git branching for the economy.
Interesting hearing about how they want to tackle the Microsoft ecosystem.<p>As someone who spent years in that ecosystem and recently left it for OSS, I'll be curious to see what kind of success they see and who they are targeting.
I was really quite surprised at the way this article was pitched. I'd expect to read this airy, hand-wavy level of detail in a news magazine, not <i>Wired</i>.
I did a double-take at the title and am left wondering whether or not the one-letter difference between this and William Golding's Nobel Prize-winning "Lord of the Flies" is purposeful or not.