7 ms·

Put change.gov Under Revision Control

49 points by pg 18y ago

gruseom 18y ago
The Internet Archive is almost certainly capturing all these changes for posterity. That admittedly doesn't really address O'Reilly's main goal, to legitimate version tracking as a device for political transparency. But there's another problem, too. The Internet Archive has a 6-month lag between collecting and publishing. That cripples it for oversight purposes, which is a pity. I only found this out because http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://change.gov http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://change.gov doesn't have anything yet. Maybe they could be persuaded to fast-track pages with a .gov suffix or something.
tlrobinson 18y ago
Well, government documents aren't eligible for copyright, so anyone could hack together a crawler and republish the entire history of change.gov (or any other .gov, for that matter). Right? In fact, this would be even better, since there would be no way for the government to retroactively tamper with the record. <tinfoilhat>well, except by cracking my servers via those NSA backdoors in AES</tinfoilhat>
brandnewlow 18y ago
http://versionista.com/ http://versionista.com/ ?
markessien 18y ago
If you do this, then every single change in a word or a phrase will have some article about it. Some people will compulsively track every small change - and what this means is that the government will have to be extra careful before changing even a word. This will lead to bureaucracy, and even more secrecy, because working documents would never get published, only final documents. Putting change.gov under source control is not a good idea. You want Obama personally having to field questions all the time, because some secretary chose a particular order of words?
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  Some of the changes are extremely important. For instance, Obama originally had this to say about forced labor: Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Now all he says is this: They'll [Obama and Biden] set a goal that all middle school and high school students engage in 50 hours of community service a year, and develop a plan for all college students who engage in 100 hours of community service to receive a fully-refundable tax credit of $4,000 for their education. (Both from http://change.gov/americaserves http://change.gov/americaserves) There are major, substantial changes being made here. There is also obfuscation going on, as you see above. Knowledge of what he previously wrote clarifies what "set a goal" means. I think it's important for the American people to see this.
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    As the parent comment illustrates, change.gov is already under version control. It's just being maintained by an army of semi-independent volunteers using ad hoc tools. If you build a website with a substantial audience, every change of every word is being tracked, by Google and the Wayback Machine if nothing else. That's just the facts of life in the 21st century.
    - yummyfajitas 18y ago
      So far, the wayback machine has nothing on change.gov. My ad-hoc mechanism of tracking changes was the following: I remembered a conversation on the internet, during which the website was modified (1). I then managed to google this conversation, and find quotes on the original language. I managed to track precisely one change, but I'm reasonably web savvy (read: I've written webapps, probably putting me in the top 1% of web users). Do you think the average citizen could manage to do even that? (1) In fact, after it was modified, several Obamatons accused the conservative posters of lying about the contents of the website. This is another hazard of unmarked modifications.
jonknee 18y ago
Version control for bills would be quite interesting.
- patio11 18y ago
  That is actually done. http://thomas.loc.gov/ http://thomas.loc.gov/ Not quite as easy to use as SVN with Trac integration, I admit, but it is pretty good for government work.
JulianMorrison 18y ago
What would be really interesting about having policy documents up on github or something, would be not just the changes, but the change notes. "Took this bit out, can't afford it, diverting funds to health instead", etc.
ars 18y ago
Not everything has to be automated - why not do manual version control?

49 points by pg 18y ago

The Internet Archive is almost certainly capturing all these changes for posterity. That admittedly doesn't really address O'Reilly's main goal, to legitimate version tracking as a device for political transparency. But there's another problem, too. The Internet Archive has a 6-month lag between collecting and publishing. That cripples it for oversight purposes, which is a pity. I only found this out because http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://change.gov http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://change.gov doesn't have anything yet. Maybe they could be persuaded to fast-track pages with a .gov suffix or something.

tlrobinson 18y ago

Well, government documents aren't eligible for copyright, so anyone could hack together a crawler and republish the entire history of change.gov (or any other .gov, for that matter). Right? In fact, this would be even better, since there would be no way for the government to retroactively tamper with the record. <tinfoilhat>well, except by cracking my servers via those NSA backdoors in AES</tinfoilhat>

brandnewlow 18y ago

http://versionista.com/ http://versionista.com/ ?

markessien 18y ago

If you do this, then every single change in a word or a phrase will have some article about it. Some people will compulsively track every small change - and what this means is that the government will have to be extra careful before changing even a word. This will lead to bureaucracy, and even more secrecy, because working documents would never get published, only final documents. Putting change.gov under source control is not a good idea. You want Obama personally having to field questions all the time, because some secretary chose a particular order of words?

yummyfajitas 18y ago
Some of the changes are extremely important. For instance, Obama originally had this to say about forced labor: Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Now all he says is this: They'll [Obama and Biden] set a goal that all middle school and high school students engage in 50 hours of community service a year, and develop a plan for all college students who engage in 100 hours of community service to receive a fully-refundable tax credit of $4,000 for their education. (Both from http://change.gov/americaserves http://change.gov/americaserves) There are major, substantial changes being made here. There is also obfuscation going on, as you see above. Knowledge of what he previously wrote clarifies what "set a goal" means. I think it's important for the American people to see this.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  As the parent comment illustrates, change.gov is already under version control. It's just being maintained by an army of semi-independent volunteers using ad hoc tools. If you build a website with a substantial audience, every change of every word is being tracked, by Google and the Wayback Machine if nothing else. That's just the facts of life in the 21st century.
  - yummyfajitas 18y ago
    So far, the wayback machine has nothing on change.gov. My ad-hoc mechanism of tracking changes was the following: I remembered a conversation on the internet, during which the website was modified (1). I then managed to google this conversation, and find quotes on the original language. I managed to track precisely one change, but I'm reasonably web savvy (read: I've written webapps, probably putting me in the top 1% of web users). Do you think the average citizen could manage to do even that? (1) In fact, after it was modified, several Obamatons accused the conservative posters of lying about the contents of the website. This is another hazard of unmarked modifications.

jonknee 18y ago

Version control for bills would be quite interesting.

patio11 18y ago
That is actually done. http://thomas.loc.gov/ http://thomas.loc.gov/ Not quite as easy to use as SVN with Trac integration, I admit, but it is pretty good for government work.

JulianMorrison 18y ago

What would be really interesting about having policy documents up on github or something, would be not just the changes, but the change notes. "Took this bit out, can't afford it, diverting funds to health instead", etc.

ars 18y ago

Not everything has to be automated - why not do manual version control?