4 ms·

I look forward to the day when constitutional amendments are pull requests.

mishraprince 6y ago
Absolutely! It would be a dream come true if Indian law-makers start doing things in the public, allowing public to comment/vet their ideas/thoughts/plans on upcoming legislations. I'm not sure if you're aware: currently the farmers in India's capital are protesting against the farm acts the Govt. introduced. The acts are supposed to do good to the farmers, but since they did not involve them, there is a lot of misinformation and protest.
gwright 6y ago
Not just constitutional amendments, legal documents of all kinds would benefit from standard formatting and version control. One difficult challenge is that text-line based diffs don't work well for free-form text documents. Line length, line breaks, paragraph breaks, list formatting, etc. are very ad-hoc in most legal documents.
- smlckz 6y ago
  If diff is not enough, you have wdiff. :)
  - gwright 6y ago
    Helpful, but in the real-world legislative systems I've interacted with, the patch (the bill text) isn't formatted as an algorithmic diff against the base documents (statutes, for example). It is a baroque system that requires huge amounts of clerical effort to keep aligned and which makes understanding all but the simplest changes a mind-numbing exercise.
- Udik 6y ago
  In Italy (and I guess in many other places) laws are effectively commits, not documents/ files. The actual law is often implicit in the result of the successive modifications each new law applies to the existing ones. Which is terrible from a usability perspective- it's like working with lists of patches instead of files. I think software engineers- thanks to much faster iteration cycles and having clarity and order as their only concern- have developed solutions and practices that absolutely can and should be applied also to the management of the law.
  - gwright 6y ago
    I think you are just describing the difference between a bill (what is debated and discussed during the legislative process), and the compendium of statutes (or regulations, etc.) that is updated via the legislative process. My understanding is that there are always administrative departments responsible for updating and publishing the statutes based on the bills that have been passed. This is effectively applying a patch approved by the legislative process to the repository of statutes. If you try to dig into a mainstream news story about legislative actions to the actual bill text you'll quickly find that for all but the simplest actions the bill text is useless for understanding the effect of the bill. The problem is that you need the surrounding context of the statute or regulation that is being amended in order to understand. At least for my state and the US federal legislative systems, the web based UI for understanding all this is abysmal. The cynic in me thinks that legislators don't even understand the true nature of their own legislation. They are making voting decisions based on staff summaries, verbal discussions, media reports, constituent sentiment analysis, etc.
    - Udik 6y ago
      > that there are always administrative departments responsible for updating and publishing the statutes based on the bills that have been passed I don't think that's the case in Italy. A bill often takes the takes the form of sequences such as "in the bill n. 1234/05 at the subparagraph 2, the word X is replaced with the word Y." There isn't, to my knowledge, a notion of "document" which the patch is applied to. You can, of course, derive the documents from the successive patches, and laws on new matters contain an entire document as a "first commit". But in software engineering it's the documents/ files you care about, patches and commits only exist as a support for change management.
      - gwright 6y ago
        That is interesting. Thanks for elaborating.
      - dmurray 6y ago
        Doesn't anyone take the job of publishing the derived documents, with all the changes made? This seems like it should be done by some government department, but if it's not, still a lucrative opportunity for the private sector (surely every lawyer would buy a copy /subscribe to your service).
- magni- 6y ago
  I did something like this for "fun" a number of years ago: https://github.com/magni-/visa-waiver-program/pull/2/files https://github.com/magni-/visa-waiver-program/pull/2/files There was a lot of media noise about this bill, and it was frustratingly difficult to figure out what it actually did.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
  I read once that the legal team at Github uses git commits in all their documents. Not sure where I read it. But it would be interesting to know more if it's true.
ssivark 6y ago
But they (almost) are! They just have a more involved review process, requiring sign offs from many more people (from a diverse group of representative stakeholders) given what’s at stake. A lot of the process/bureaucracy comes from the scale & scope of what’s being managed.

Absolutely! It would be a dream come true if Indian law-makers start doing things in the public, allowing public to comment/vet their ideas/thoughts/plans on upcoming legislations. I'm not sure if you're aware: currently the farmers in India's capital are protesting against the farm acts the Govt. introduced. The acts are supposed to do good to the farmers, but since they did not involve them, there is a lot of misinformation and protest.

gwright 6y ago

Not just constitutional amendments, legal documents of all kinds would benefit from standard formatting and version control. One difficult challenge is that text-line based diffs don't work well for free-form text documents. Line length, line breaks, paragraph breaks, list formatting, etc. are very ad-hoc in most legal documents.

smlckz 6y ago
If diff is not enough, you have wdiff. :)
- gwright 6y ago
  Helpful, but in the real-world legislative systems I've interacted with, the patch (the bill text) isn't formatted as an algorithmic diff against the base documents (statutes, for example). It is a baroque system that requires huge amounts of clerical effort to keep aligned and which makes understanding all but the simplest changes a mind-numbing exercise.
Udik 6y ago
In Italy (and I guess in many other places) laws are effectively commits, not documents/ files. The actual law is often implicit in the result of the successive modifications each new law applies to the existing ones. Which is terrible from a usability perspective- it's like working with lists of patches instead of files. I think software engineers- thanks to much faster iteration cycles and having clarity and order as their only concern- have developed solutions and practices that absolutely can and should be applied also to the management of the law.
- gwright 6y ago
  I think you are just describing the difference between a bill (what is debated and discussed during the legislative process), and the compendium of statutes (or regulations, etc.) that is updated via the legislative process. My understanding is that there are always administrative departments responsible for updating and publishing the statutes based on the bills that have been passed. This is effectively applying a patch approved by the legislative process to the repository of statutes. If you try to dig into a mainstream news story about legislative actions to the actual bill text you'll quickly find that for all but the simplest actions the bill text is useless for understanding the effect of the bill. The problem is that you need the surrounding context of the statute or regulation that is being amended in order to understand. At least for my state and the US federal legislative systems, the web based UI for understanding all this is abysmal. The cynic in me thinks that legislators don't even understand the true nature of their own legislation. They are making voting decisions based on staff summaries, verbal discussions, media reports, constituent sentiment analysis, etc.
  - Udik 6y ago
    > that there are always administrative departments responsible for updating and publishing the statutes based on the bills that have been passed I don't think that's the case in Italy. A bill often takes the takes the form of sequences such as "in the bill n. 1234/05 at the subparagraph 2, the word X is replaced with the word Y." There isn't, to my knowledge, a notion of "document" which the patch is applied to. You can, of course, derive the documents from the successive patches, and laws on new matters contain an entire document as a "first commit". But in software engineering it's the documents/ files you care about, patches and commits only exist as a support for change management.
    - gwright 6y ago
      That is interesting. Thanks for elaborating.
    - dmurray 6y ago
      Doesn't anyone take the job of publishing the derived documents, with all the changes made? This seems like it should be done by some government department, but if it's not, still a lucrative opportunity for the private sector (surely every lawyer would buy a copy /subscribe to your service).
magni- 6y ago
I did something like this for "fun" a number of years ago: https://github.com/magni-/visa-waiver-program/pull/2/files https://github.com/magni-/visa-waiver-program/pull/2/files There was a lot of media noise about this bill, and it was frustratingly difficult to figure out what it actually did.
buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
I read once that the legal team at Github uses git commits in all their documents. Not sure where I read it. But it would be interesting to know more if it's true.

ssivark 6y ago

But they (almost) are! They just have a more involved review process, requiring sign offs from many more people (from a diverse group of representative stakeholders) given what’s at stake. A lot of the process/bureaucracy comes from the scale & scope of what’s being managed.