There was a great discussion on HN previously about this topic which also explains why a straight git implementation isn't viable:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968653" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968653</a>
While it might be useful to have these in revision control, their format won't work as-is. Take this change for instance:<p><a href="https://github.com/divegeek/uscode/commit/4b58ecaa6a6ea4b15820208878c702d6e26e5b9f" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/divegeek/uscode/commit/4b58ecaa6a6ea4b158...</a><p>Lots and lots of lines that don't change anything useful, and then the one change is hard to understand because it's wrapping a bunch of words causing extra changes.<p>I would recommend un-wrapping lines before commits and then have the presentation app smart enough to not show all of the lines where just a date in a header changed, doing word wrapping on the client side.<p>Also, without commit information, the changes are hard to wade through. Are there summaries or titles of the bills that can be used in the commit message? Who are the authors that drafted the bill and who are the "committers" that voted for it?
Interesting project. My first thought was: Great, changelogs! But then I started thinking a bit deeper and realized that what I'd love to see happen (on a related note) is a site/repository where you can see not only the legislation but the relevant case law over time.
the UK parliament basically does this already:<p>here's an example of an act that's been modified:
<a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo3/41/79?timeline=true" rel="nofollow">http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo3/41/79?timeline=true</a><p>and an example of a bill going through parliament:
<a href="http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/financeno4/documents.html" rel="nofollow">http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/financeno4/docum...</a>
Funny tidbit - in the first statute in Title I, Chapter 1 (basically top-level definitions - "Words denoting number, gender, and so forth") it was considered important to include among the 10 definitions the following:<p>'the words "insane" and "insane person" and "lunatic" shall include every idiot, lunatic, insane person, and person non compos mentis;'<p>Interesting that that was considered to be up there with the legal definitions of "person", "officer", "oath", and "writing".
This idea keeps cropping up, and it terrifies me beyond all reason. It's roughly as palatable as a
direct democracy, because in effect, that's what it advocates.<p>People who deeply care about the law are already able, and willing, to find the information they
need; I'm all for making it easier to manage, and there are worthy projects in that respect, but by
no means do I want <i>ordinary citizens</i> to start dabbling in legislation. The Founding Fathers'
romantic notions notwithstanding, running a government that provides important services to 350
million people isn't a side-job—it's a full-time job, and arguably a career. Heaping disdain on career
politicians is absurd: if they're good at their job, of course they should make a career out of it.<p>Which brings me to the idea underlying all these posts: that by keeping close tabs on the intricate
details of lawmaking, we can ensure that they will do a good job. I have heard this argument before.
It came from this guy who wasn't really a coder, but wanted to keep close tabs on what the coders
that worked for him did. So he started asking them to log in all their hours, with messages
explaining what they were doing. And he started looking at the commits in the VCS so that he would
see the actual code. Of course, when he didn't like something he would criticize. He would threaten
people with getting fired if they didn't code according to his standards. The coders tried to
explain that sometimes things have to be done in a way that's different from the "common sense" way,
and sometimes he was even reasonable about it, but he still was not a coder, so <i>he had no way of
knowing what was involved.</i><p>That's who we're trying to become with projects like these. The most pointy-haired of pointy haired
bosses. Our pointy hair wants points of its own, and all because we try to hold people accountable.
That's a canard.<p>We want to hold politians accountable because we feel they are irresponsible. But what about our
responsibility? Who hired these irresponsible politicians to steward us? We did. Instead of looking
for ways to make politicians accountable, let's look for ways to make ourselves responsible. I would
start, on an individual basis, by taking ownership of our part of the equation: our vote. Remember:<p>"Accountability is something that is left when responsibility is subtracted" -- Pasi Sahlberg<p>Let's find projects that restore our responsibility. From that, the rest will follow.
Very nice idea if there was a REAL democracy, but I doubt this will be suitable to the law-makers, because most of them don't want people to know how this process is, let alone know what laws are being discussed, and even worse, who and what did he/she patch...
I placed the 2010 Dutch Pirate Party (Piratenpartij) election program on Github. I try to elad by example: Set the example by the "internet party", then hopefully others copy & paste it.<p><a href="https://github.com/generateui/VerkiezingsProgrammaPiratenPartij2010" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/generateui/VerkiezingsProgrammaPiratenPar...</a>
Love the "idea". This has been written about extensively on Quora with some very interesting discussion.
* <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-can-lawmakers-learn-from-computer-science" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/What-can-lawmakers-learn-from-computer-...</a>
* <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-nontechnical-barriers-to-adopting-a-version-control-system-for-use-in-writing-bills-new-laws" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-nontechnical-barriers-to-a...</a><p>I fear we'll find out that we really didn't want to know how the sausage is made.
It would be interesting to fork this and apply a simple and democratic amendment system that allows all followers (or some other defined and growing population like Hacker News) to vote on changes.<p>I say we use a strict majority to determine the acceptance of these amendments and forge a document that reflects the multitude of views in the hacker news community.<p>What would be the results, both realistically and idealistically, I wonder?
Would putting each legislator's changes in the open help their ability to compromise on difficult issues or hinder it? Sometimes it's easier to do the hard thing if nobody can be pegged as directly responsible.<p>That said, I suppose each committee could use pay for a subscription to do their markup "behind closed doors" before the final pull request hehe.
This is a great idea, but won't work because legal text is so obtuse. We need plain-english wording on all this in order for everyone to interact with it.
Can you imagine how helpful diffs would be in the legislative process? Instead of combing through hundreds of pages to find new changes, losses, amendments, etc., it would all be right there.<p>Let's open source the law.