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GitLaw: GitHub For Laws And Legal Documents - A Tourniquet For American Liberty

239 points by waffle_ss 14y ago

chaostheory 14y ago
It's disappointing that this is only an idea, as opposed to a semi-working prototype.
- tonfa 14y ago
  There are already lots of people working on that kind of things, e.g.: http://www.opencongress.org/ http://www.opencongress.org/ There was a barcamp not long ago: http://transparencycamp.org/ http://transparencycamp.org/ with many people from all over the world.
  - chaostheory 14y ago
    Yes but this post wasn't primarily about either one of those projects right?
    - tonfa 14y ago
      No, it is about a hypothetical project, while there are already lots of people actually building stuff (and yes they do know about github and VCS).
lux 14y ago
It makes a lot of sense for there to be a standardized, open framework for document management in general outside of source code. So many industries could improve their processes and transparency through tools like Git and services like GitHub, but they would need to be made a lot simpler than GitHub's UI. Their site has some great stuff going for developers, but scares away a few designers I know. I'd love to see a site/app like that get made.
unimpressive 14y ago
This is actually on my to-do list for "Things I need to do if I ever get on a state bar.".
pron 14y ago
Democracy Is for Amateurs: Why We Need More Citizen Citizens - http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/democracy-is-for-amateurs-why-we-need-more-citizen-citizens/256818/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/democrac...
farnsworth 14y ago
Neat idea, but is it currently really a problem to tell who has written what part of a law? Isn't this public information already? If not, then this isn't a technology problem, and it will not be easy to convince our congresscritters to keep track of who writes precisely what. And what about sections of law with shared credit, or law that comes from a committee that didn't unanimously agree, etc. I know very little about how law is written, but my impression is that most people who pay attention to it are more concerned about the large ideas than the exact wordings - that's how you have politicians voting on bills when they haven't read every word. How can they when it's thousands of pages long? So this might be more useful to a small number of politicians and lawyers who are examining law closely, looking for loopholes, or concerned about the exact details of a particular statement's pedigree, but I don't really see the general appeal. I would rather have a tool which provides similar information, but on a higher level. An independent overview in layman language, general information about how it came about, how it's significant historically or with respect to existing law, and with the option to drill down to the actual language and gritty details. Of course, this would take much more work to build and maintain. I've been a fan of opencongress.org but I've found that switching between opencongress and wikipedia is the most effective way to understand the context and significance of a bill. Reading the actual text of a law is usually about as useful to me for determining its implications as reading the source code of a printer driver would be to my dad for figuring out how to install a printer.
- gauravk92 14y ago
  Bills used to not be 1000 page tomes. Special interests usually cause that bloat by lobbying for exemptions or credits in special circumstances. There's no real reason it has to be 2000 pages, it's not going to be three pages either though.
drstrangevibes 14y ago
the documents themselves arent the problem, the real deception lies in the use of language and words of art
- fidotron 14y ago
  Exactly. My semi serious view is that laws should be written in Prolog.
  - eurleif 14y ago
    I think there will come a time when people will look back and find it quaint and impractical that we tried to interpret our massive legal system by hand, rather than leaving that sort of thing to computers.
  - polymatter 14y ago
    or how about Lojban? That way it can be machine readable, unambiguously queried, culturally neutral and actually be a language designed for human communication. (xkcd 191 comic joke notwithstanding)
  - philwelch 14y ago
    I, for one, would prefer not to be imprisoned due to a bug.
    - drstrangevibes 14y ago
      many people already are, though the bugs are lexical in nature
      - philwelch 14y ago
        The difference is that you can often get a judge to say "hey, that's a bug!" and then you're released.
        drstrangevibes 14y ago
lazerwalker 14y ago
This is a laudable idea. Unfortunately, the key challenge with the problem isn't architecting a DVCS-like service for legal documents (for an MVP, you could easily get by simply designing a novel frontend to git), it's an adoption problem. The current system is flawed, yes, but merely offering a superior product for less money isn't enough to make a dent in the bureaucratic nightmare of modern-day Washington. I'm reminded of an article I saw here on HN a few months back: http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works- http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-n...
- gordianknot 14y ago
  Adoption isn't the problem. We don't need Congress to use such a system initially; we need bills, the US Code, etc. mirrored on Github. When it's there, people will get it. The information is out there, it just needs to be processed into a usable form so that it works with Git. And it'd take millions of dollars, and have no conventional ROI, so no one's going to do it.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    Aren't bills formatted similarly? Couldn't you then just OCR them?
  - lnguyen 14y ago
    There's Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php). Bill text is available in PDF, XML and a printer-friendly HTML. The question is how up-to-date the bill texts are. I doubt it can tracks in real time with changes/amendments voted on, etc. but then again any system bolted on the process as opposed to being fundamentally integrated into the process wouldn't be.
  - sc68cal 14y ago
    >And it'd take millions of dollars, and have no conventional ROI, so no one's going to do it. Your pessimism is unwarranted. There is already one user on GitHub that scrapes the US Code and mirrors it. He even tags the changes so you can diff them quite easily. https://github.com/divegeek/uscode https://github.com/divegeek/uscode
rmc 14y ago
Won't change anything. It's proposing a technical solution to a people problem. Right now laws are openly available, but people don't care enough to get look into them. Also, just because you have "git blame" doesn't mean you'll now magically be able to see what corporate lobbyist wrote the law, because they'd just ask the legislator to commit it instead. Wouldn't change anything.
- draggnar 14y ago
  but at the same time it is kind of a technical problem. one big reason why people don't look at the laws is because they get changed all the time without a transparant way to see what ends up getting changed right before a vote. something like gitlaw would allow people, and lawyers, to track changes to laws much easier. adoption is definitely the problem, but this can help lawyers make proposals and counterproposals with the speed of software developers, which may give lawyers a reason to sign on.
  - amalag 14y ago
    So it's still a people problem, a 'gitlaw' would keep track of who changed what. You would still have to find out who did what.
msgilligan 14y ago
GitLaw, if implemented, would be a significant improvement over law by gits -- which is what we have now. Unfortunately, I don't think the problem (with Congress) is technological. If GitLaw were implemented, a lobbyist wouldn't be making a pull request directly, they'd influence someone to do it for them so it wouldn't be traceable -- which is pretty much the way it works now.
- dgregd 14y ago
  > hey'd influence someone to do it for them so Because now there are hundreds of people to check. We don't known exactly who did what. With GitLow there will be one direct person responsible. SCM helps a lot with source code. Imagine 400 people software project without SCM.
kemiller 14y ago
I basically agree with everyone pouring cold water on this as far as reforming the statute law system is concerned. That is a much more entrenched problem than any computer system is going to solve overnight. However, I do see a niche for DIY contract law. Sort of like Nolo Press on steroids. Where you can browse standard contracts and then modify them to suit your needs in a visible and traceable way. Or possibly for contract negotiations, where each party makes changes. This would keep track of history in a neutral and verifiable way. (Could save time and errors for individuals and small law firms....)
mrweasel 14y ago
I like the idea. I've been wanting to do something similar for the laws here in Denmark, but getting good data is tricky.... Strangely enough. My reasoning is that I feel that politicians are constantly filling with existing laws and the changes are conveyed via strang legal terms, e.g. "This changes "they to us in paragraph five, section 2, line 3". This is a complete bullshit way of informing the public about the changes to our laws. If laws where tracked the same way we as developers track our code, hiding even minor changes would be impossible. Just imagine getting a daily / weekly change log for the laws passed by your government. Even our lazy journalists should be able to dig up something in appropriate every now and then if they knew what changed. Wonderful idea.
- tonfa 14y ago
  Most country with a codification system also publish consolidated codes, so you don't have to apply the diff yourself.
fourspace 14y ago
Great idea. Wasn't Docracy pitched as exactly this, "GitHub for legal docs"? Looks like it's morphed into something entirely different. Shame. http://docracy.com http://docracy.com
- pents90 14y ago
  It hasn't morphed, we just don't market it on the homepage as "GitHub for Legal Docs" since lawyers and the general public have no idea what that is. But it is open-sourced legal docs, with versioning, diffs and a Github-style ownership/branching model. John (Co-Founder of Docracy)
ynniv 14y ago
This is one of those ideas that gets suggested on a frequent basis. Those who suggest it often think that the problem is one of complexity management, like managing source code changes. The actual problem is one of power and intention. Yes, version control would make earmarks obvious. Yes, it would make tracking contributors (lobbies) easier. Yes, it would make tailoring tried and trusted legal documents easy. All of these are reasons why version control will never be applied to the law. We want these things, but we are not the customer. The real customer is actively trying to prevent these things from ever happening. The reality is that these tools are probably already being used for these exact purposes - in private, and for personal gain.
- Cushman 14y ago
  I agree 100%, but I think that's only the short view-- the extant governments aren't going to be around forever, and in the long run we need smart people to spend time thinking about how to structure a government that's learned from our mistakes. Of course we won't see Congress outlaw lobbying, but there's definitely an opportunity today to try some of these concepts in an organization, community, or even willing local government.
  - newbie12 14y ago
    Congress can't outlaw lobbying, it is a core Constitutional right (free speech, right to assemble, right to petition govt). The problem is that the government is too big and has too much power, so the rewards for lobbying are so great.
- user23409 14y ago
  Thank you for your cynicism, it's super productive. Let's not discuss or try to improve upon the idea. Let's just tell him why we think he's wrong. /rant Continuing with OP's thought. Making the legislator who introduces the bill commit the bill would be an awesome piece of information and might make some legislators think twice about what they introduce and how they title it. And all the statistics that could be run on a repo of laws would be a ridiculously useful resource.
andrewcooke 14y ago
so this is designed to cut the flow of blood to american liberty? i guess i don't understand the imagery in the name?
nathanhammond 14y ago
I've dreamed up something like this as well and realistically there isn't anything preventing us from using git to manage our laws. As a strawman to beat up, here is an example of how it could work: git clone legislature/generalstatutes s/marijuana/sugar/g git commit -am "Turn sugar into a controlled substance." git request-pull Legislators If interested, # git branch bill_12345 git pull nathanhammond/generalstatutes // Continue editing the "Sugar as a controlled substance" bill. Spin off to committee (read/write to committee members) git clone legislature/generalstatutes git checkout bill_12345 // Continue editing the "Sugar as a controlled substance" bill. git commit -am "Committee updates." Take a vote for leaving committee. If successful, # git request-pull General legislature takes a vote. If successful, # git merge bill_12345 master --signoff (Legislators that voted for it.) Benefits: - Encourages broader participation in democracy. - Cryptographically signed. We'll know if you voted for or wrote it. - Tracks history of all changes (at least at the commit level). If something comes out of committee very different from how it went in you can easily find every change. - Makes it easier for newspeople to identify how the law is changing. - An interface like GitHub over top of the repository could hide all of the complexity, allow for line-by-line comments, and general comments. - Registering to the interface with your voter ID could allow for representatives to identify or poll constituents. Problems: - Requires behavioral change for legislators who I would not necessarily classify as "early adopters." - Still possible to "launder" the creator by having somebody else make the changes for you. - In place modification of the law. To this point when something is repealed it typically looks something like this: http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySection/Chapter_153/GS_153-1_through_153-382.html http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySect...
vnorby 14y ago
You can use GitHub for legal documents already. Just convert your documents to markdown. We put our TOS and Privacy Policy on Github from launch: https://github.com/everyme/everyme-legal https://github.com/everyme/everyme-legal We haven't had any issues or pull requests recently but we would welcome them for sure.
J3L2404 14y ago
It's going to be extremely difficult to refactor.
DougBTX 14y ago
For the UK, it makes me wonder how close you could get with the data here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ http://www.legislation.gov.uk/
- objclxt 14y ago
  Not very (I maintain a nice iPhone app that front-ends the data on legislation.gov.uk): the data on legislation.gov.uk is useful for Joe Public, but when it comes to the actual practice of the law is woefully incomplete. This is purely down to a lack of interest and funding on the Government's part, as well as vested interests by people who publish law and charge for it. There is no free source of up-to-date UK law: many of the statute on legislation.gov.uk is not guaranteed to be up to date, and if you're looking to practice this is obviously no good at all. This is in itself very sad. The people who run legislation.gov.uk do a fantastic job, and hopefully access will get much better in the future.
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >many of the statute on legislation.gov.uk is not guaranteed to be up to date // They say it's updated within 24h of publication. Which seems to be as up to date as you'll get. There are http://services.parliament.uk/bills/ http://services.parliament.uk/bills/ and http://bills.ais.co.uk/AC.asp http://bills.ais.co.uk/AC.asp for tracking bills before publication (the later one isn't working at the moment though). So for example the 1st reading in the Lords of the Online Safety Bill was on 14th May and the text can be read at http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/onlinesafety.html http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/onlinesafety.htm....
deleted 14y ago
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reinhardt 14y ago
In addition to this being first and foremost a political/people problem as many have pointed out, the technical challenges of applying standard CMS and document management solutions to legislation environments are pretty much unknown or underestimated by most of us. For those interested, Sean McGrath has posted a series of posts addressing some of these challenges: http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/xml-in-legislatureparliament.html http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/xml-in-legislaturepa...
skimmas 14y ago
Why git? Why not a Wiki?
- rurounijones 14y ago
  Git advantages are things better version management, branches, pulls etc Having said that you can (and do) have Wikis that are backed by git.
cies 14y ago
> It looks like there is an existing project > called Legal-RDF that was created to add > semantic data to digital legal documents, > but it’s XML and therefore not very readable. RDF has several other formats besides XML (turtle being one of the more human readable formats).
agumonkey 14y ago
Is this a recent trend in peoples mind ? Distributed versionning brings out the need to understand laws I guess.
DomKM 14y ago
Please don't actually call this GitLaw. A better name conversion would be LawHub since most lawyers have no idea what Git is.
- Kiro 14y ago
  LawHub could be anything while GitLaw is exactly what it says: laws versioned in git.
lomegor 14y ago
How do we start doing this? Is anyone willing to put some time to build this? Of course this would be non-profit. Maybe if we get enough people interested, we can start pressuring different organization to help us (Wikimedia comes to mind). There would be a need for people writing the laws into text and coders for implementing different aspects. Maybe crowdfunded. I don't know, just throwing ideas to see if anyone is interested. We don't need the government to do this. We have the data (or most of it). We need to start changing it from the outside.
nowarninglabel 14y ago
Relevant discussion from 3 years ago on Slashdot: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/03/06/1451216/congress-mulls-api-for-congressional-data http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/03/06/1451216/congre...
nickpinkston 14y ago
IANAL, but... Why don't we instead build a "Startup Law Standard" kind of thing that can get network effects in the startup scene. Get all the big firms law firm / VCs / angels / etc. signed on to these standards. How would this look? I've read a lot of contracts, and you see some similar stuff. In many ways, it's kind of like programming: VARIABLE DEFINITIONS: at the top - like: "'Company' shall be XYZ, Inc., a Delaware Corporation located in 100 Main St.", and so on. TESTS: These are normally "Warranties and Representations" - these are often quite boiler-plate like: "Assignor is owner of all Intellectual Property", etc. AUTHENTICATION: Signatures, etc. I bet that 80-90% documents could be generated by a set of 500 boiler-plate sections with fill-in-the-blank type of stuff. There could be built into these something that'd figure out the incompatibility (i.e. "exclusive" in one section wouldn't work with "non-exclusive" in another). Term Sheets are pretty standardized now with a couple made forms that are considered modern. Why can't we do the rest? Call me crazy, but couldn't this at the very least reduce law costs, and at best be the first step down a road of nearly full-auto law? Then again - IANAL...
- rprasad 14y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but most of the legal documents you pay for are already standardized. They have been for years (or decades, depending on the area of law). You're paying for the customizations that are specific to your situation. Obviously, standardized language has done nothing to reduce costs. The problem is supply-side: despite the glut of (new) lawyers, there are still not enough lawyers that people are willing to trust with their business.
  - nickpinkston 14y ago
    Well I know that - I'm asking why can't it be codified more so it's more consistent and able to be interacted with. The issue with lack of "trustable" lawyers could perhaps be improved by such a tool?
gioele 14y ago
Law is a very, very, very hard task to tackle properly. You may not know but there have been three big "generations" of law systems. Many parliaments are starting to use fourth generation systems. Third and fourth generation systems look a lot like a complex git, but there are many things that should and do work differently. When I started dealing with these things I thought that it was a solved problem, just use SVN (the cool kid at the time) and everything will be solved. Well, none of the existing versioning models work well with law documents, especially acts. The general ideas do apply, but many of the details do not. For example, just think of a merge conflict: who are you so solve a merge a conflict? What you have to do is to just record the conflict and create two parallel universes, one in which the conflict has been resolved using branch A and another one in which the conflict is resolved using branch B. You then keep these two universes alive and apply all the later changes twice. You have to do this until a judge or a legal body declares one of the "branches" the correct one; this may take years and the decision reverted (even partially) many times. A few links to relevant standards and systems: * Legal XML: http://www.legalxml.org/ http://www.legalxml.org/ An OASIS working group that is merging all the relevant national standards into a worldwide standard. * Akoma Ntoso: http://www.akomantoso.org/ http://www.akomantoso.org/ A UN/DESA-sponsored format for legal documents. * CEN Metalex: http://www.leibnizcenter.org/ http://www.leibnizcenter.org/ a meta-format that acts as an exchange format between legacy formats and new systems. * LexML: http://projeto.lexml.gov.br/documentacao/resumo-em-ingles http://projeto.lexml.gov.br/documentacao/resumo-em-ingles A huge Akoma Ntoso-based repository of Brazilian laws. * ICA/SPP: http://www.ica.org/792/about-section-for-archives-of-parliaments-and-political-parties-spp/about-parliamentary-and-political-party-archives-spp.html http://www.ica.org/792/about-section-for-archives-of-parliam... The groups of archivists that deals with all the fine points you have to deal with when archiving laws and dealing with legal documents in general. The main international conference on Law and IT is Jurix, it started in 1988. Check out their proceedings to see how things evolved over time. If you are interested in hacking something related to laws or legal documents (judgements, parliamentary debate records, historical versions of laws) just get in contact with me. Disclaimer: I work in this field and I am related to some of these systems.
- harshreality 14y ago
  What do you do about bills which refer to existing laws, with instructions to "strike blah" and "insert foo before x in section xxx of this chapter"? Maybe it's possible to parse that and apply that sort of bill most of the time, but I'd be surprised if it were possible to do so reliably (unless natural language processing becomes a solved problem) (or perhaps I'm overestimating the complexity of legislative language and converting legislation into a patch against existing law is not a hard problem). The first step, however, could be to do revision control of bills, blind to references to existing law. Representing bills as patches to current body of law is the endgame, but I think simple revision control of bills as they wind through the legislative process would add a lot of value and would be relatively straightforward.
iandanforth 14y ago
May I suggest that code wins arguments? If this is a better way to do things, than starting with a small town that's about to incorporate could demonstrate that this could work. Not the best list of such towns, but a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities#Unbuilt_or_under_construction_planned_cities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities#Unbuilt_...
jph 14y ago
Hypothes.is is great for this -- see http://hypothes.is http://hypothes.is. "A distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site. "It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O'Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.
- ap22213 14y ago
  It is great for this, or it will be? I've been eagerly waiting to see what comes out of this group for a while now. The principles seem great, but I think they should apply their 12 principles to the initiation phases, as well. It's currently hard to discern from their site what their short term goals are or even where they currently are in the process. Seems like an enormously positive effort, but I'm remaining skeptical. I wish that they had more public dialogue of what they're doing and more demonstration of getting the general public involved early. Plus, I think their approach may be too grandiose and top down. I would like to see it first applied effectively at the grassroots. For instance, can the model successfully be applied to a small collective? If that's possible, then try to scale it to city, state, nation, and globe. Also, do they really need funding first to start rolling forward toward some of their objectives? There seems to be a lot of passion in this space and a lot of smart people willing to work for free now, with the right leadership.
- neilk 14y ago
  I don't see how hypothes.is has anything to do with this... that project seems to be about annotating any content. (And incidentally, universal annotation systems are paradigmatic chicken and egg problem; people keep trying to do this and it never reaches broad adoption). Github for law is a much more modest and realizable idea, by comparison.
lisper 14y ago
Anyone interested in this should check out: http://www.plainsite.org/ http://www.plainsite.org/
javajosh 14y ago
This can be done, and in fact there is a business in it too: an open source competitor to Lexis and Westlaw. Data entry is bound to be a problem, as no-one is going to want to give up electronic data, but I for one would be willing to spend a few hours a week transcribing documents at the local courthouse.
- a3camero 14y ago
  You might enjoy the free legal data service offered in Canada that has most of the cases that you can find on Westlaw/Lexis: canlii.org. It could be more open, but it's free and works well.
nerdfiles 14y ago
We need github for music.
ap22213 14y ago
Great idea, and seems to be a relatively wide-spread one, at that. But, as others have mentioned, it faces steep adoption challenges. I recommend taking a look at Rogers' 5 Factors of Adoption [1] as a starting point. It would be extremely challenging to get this approach adopted from the top down, especially in an entrenched democratic system. Instead, a less risky approach may be to first get it successfully applied at the small scale. For instance, can you get a small township/incorporation to adopt this method? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
newbusox 14y ago
This is a fine goal, however, beyond what other have said here, it's important to realize that a lot of "laws" or "rules" that impact individuals on a day to day basis are not created by Congress at all--in fact, they're created via administrative agencies through rulemaking processes (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulemaking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulemaking). This is where the "rubber meets the road" of actually implementing broadly worded language that Congress has passed, and how these rules are promulgated can be vastly different from how Congress operates. For one, administrative agency rulemaking is almost always open to public comment and, by law, these agencies are obligated to take into considerations comments left by the public. In a number of ways the process is more open and participatory than legislative law making, and, as mentioned, the regulations passed often have more of a direct impact on day to day life. There are a number of solutions out there that are attempting to make this process more transparent and participatory: for example, http://regulationroom.org/ http://regulationroom.org/ (operated by a clinic at Cornell law school). In my opinion, informing the public of the importance and participatory nature of rulemaking (and getting more people involved) is probably a more realistically achievable goal than the proposed solution, and would likely have more tangible effect.
cpeterso 14y ago
In 2007, New Zealand experimented with a public wiki to collect input for a revision to the Policing Act laws. In 2008, the wiki would be reviewed by a parliamentary committee. I'm not sure what the outcome was, but the wiki itself is now offline. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7015024.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7015024.stm
arihersh 14y ago
For anyone interested in this idea, check out legalhacks.org and join us for a hackathon at UC Hastings on May 19, to mark up legislation and discuss metadata standards for legislation. internationallegislation.eventbrite.com Having legislative markup is necessary for any git-like system, because of the complex ways that amendments are currently made. We'll be joined at the hackathon by Grant Vergottini, a member of the LegalXML OASIS committee, and the person who built the legislative editor that California uses. As many people here have commented, adoption by legislatures of [seems my earlier comment does not appear]
dlf 14y ago
Having worked on actual legislative and regulatory amendments, this would be useful simply for collating input of stakeholders. One example would be regulatory comment periods.
grantcv1 14y ago
I've been doing version management of law for 10 years. As Gioele said, (Hi Gioele!) it is a very very hard task to tackle. The problem is the 200+ years of tradition that you must drag along. In a prior life I've done version management for CAD data and software data. Those are both much simpler problems, largely because changes in procedures are so much easier when you don't have such a large legacy. As someone said, legislation is all about patching the law - although the more polite term is "amending" the law. While I have built and deployed a system to automate the generation of amendments and the compilation of law, building such a system to the more general case is mind boggling. For this to be accomplished, there is going to have to be a lot of buy-in from the legislatures themselves for they are going to have to be willing to change. That is the challenge - change at that level is a bit glacial. In the meantime, I am writing an HTML5 based legislative editor to at least get some substance behind the idea - it's at http://legalhacks.org http://legalhacks.org. I'll post a video on how it works tomorrow. It's still a bit fragile too - this stuff is hard.
dgregd 14y ago
Let's build a prototype. Kickstarter? I'm not from US but I'll donate. This is so important for all democratic countries. Then I'll vote for _any party_ which will deploy the git law system.
deleted 14y ago
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habeanf 14y ago
I volunteer at the Public Knowledge Foundation (an Israeli version of The Sunlight Foundation), we develop and maintain oknesset.org (like opencongress.org). For the past couple months we've been researching the possibility of representing Israeli law as a git repository, so that oknesset.org can visualize the diff to a law a bill proposal represents, and track it as a branch until it is merged into law. Since Israel is a relatively young and small country the number of laws and changes is orders of magnitude smaller than most western/democratic countries which publicize the legislative process. Israel's legislative branch is unicameral so the process itself is relatively straightforward; supposedly we'd be a good test case. We already have quite a lot of insight but in general it seems that git (and generally, any VCS) has significant impedance mismatch with the legislative process, specifically regarding the ability to compile/link all the different laws into one comprehensive database representing the law. One prominent example is the existence of multiple timelines of ratification. There are at least three dates relevant to the ratification of bills: 1. Date of third (and final) vote = the date the parliament has voted a bill as law 2. Date of publication (for technical reasons this might not coincide with the vote date) 3. Date of validity - a bill is usually passed with a date of validity, between the date of publication and validity the bill is not formally law yet. Sometimes there are separate dates of validity for separate parts of the bill. To make matters more complicated, dates of validity can be changed when the bill designates government ministers with the authority to change them (the dates). Also, in Israel many laws never "make it" to their date of validity since the yearly Law of Arrangements (http://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/eng/hesderim_eng.htm http://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/eng/hesderim_eng.htm) decides which laws passed in the previous year have proper funding, such that officially some laws get "punted" into the future, possibly indefinitely. It gets quite confusing because from a legal point of view, the dates that are relevant to the justice system (as in, when a bill is relevant or not to the court) are usually the date of voting, whereas when it comes to government the third date is the important one. We are still moving forward with our initiative, but it seems that for now there are no version control systems which are a good solution to the law management problem. (edited for formatting)
borderbandit 14y ago
Abe, interesting idea and one I would like to run with. @nicholascloud, you make a good point about the “baby-sitting” of documents but I believe it can be resolved by crowd-sourcing the project with a “vested” membership interested in seeing the project succeed. This would also allow for controlling the abuse of the site by spammers. One part of the project would be converting the bloated material into something readable for the average participant. Because the material editor will be working on something he, or she is interested in then it would be a labor that they would happily engage in. @michael, you make a valid point but I believe a crowd-sourced vested individuals like Wikimedia would work in keeping the problems at bay. @tobi, I would suggest that the concept be kept private and not government controlled as any government initiative would only create a bureaucracy that would stifle innovation and open discourse. My country, Mexico is going through a national referendum right now with the drug war as a backdrop and part of the drama. Although it is a national election I call it a referendum because the results will give an insight into what our country wants in terms of dealing with the narco-types. Will we continue with the strategy, increase the engagement or back-off and let them do as they please? My original idea was to crowd-source political commentary/analysis but your post is making me expand the concept to include your idea. The initial countries I would like to include are the United States and Mexico as I have a basic understanding of their political processes but I would love for it to include as many countries as possible. I noticed that there is a lot of interest in this concept/idea and therefore I want to officially put out a call for those interested in forming such a site. I am willing to put up server space, domain name (polit.co) and initial programming. With Abe’s permission and hopefully, his participation I have a created a Twitter handle @polit_co to start the organizing. I look forward to everyone’s participation. Let’s get this going.
lbrdn 14y ago
We're missing the point I think. A site like this wouldn't be a way to combat lobbyist. It would be a way for citizens to become the lobbyists. If a site like this did pop up, it would eventually be dominated by a voice leaning a certain way. So, this is not a one-site-fixes-all type deal. This format could be a way for citizens to collaborate with other like-minded citizens and write legislation of their own.
saizai 14y ago
Hi everyone! I'm working on a project called http://makeyourlaws.org http://makeyourlaws.org. It's open source and non profit. Simply put, it's a practical project that aims to completely replace existing legislatures with online liquid democracies, through incremental steps within the existing legal system that have real teeth all the way. No waiting for a revolution and no begging. Read the site & its G+ page for details. In particular having a git for laws is going to be a necessary backend system — along with e.g. pretty diff, blame, mass import, in-browser editor, simple markup language for laws, etc. MYL is not git-based as it were — the policy authoring process is discussion- and voting-based, as it's a fundamentally different process than code authoring — but once it does get to being about laws, git is a good model. There are of course also a number of other subprojects within MYL, like legal identity verification, empathy-creating discussion systems, factchecking, privacy-preserving voter-verifiable auditable-in-aggregate cryptographic vote proofs, etc etc. If you're interested in working on git-law, or online liquid democracy in general, please contact me either by email to makeyourlaws@saizai.com or posting a comment at https://plus.google.com/100183759660923071401/posts/NQVuM65jZqp https://plus.google.com/100183759660923071401/posts/NQVuM65j... We're making it happen.

239 points by waffle_ss 14y ago

chaostheory 14y ago

It's disappointing that this is only an idea, as opposed to a semi-working prototype.

tonfa 14y ago
There are already lots of people working on that kind of things, e.g.: http://www.opencongress.org/ http://www.opencongress.org/ There was a barcamp not long ago: http://transparencycamp.org/ http://transparencycamp.org/ with many people from all over the world.
- chaostheory 14y ago
  Yes but this post wasn't primarily about either one of those projects right?
  - tonfa 14y ago
    No, it is about a hypothetical project, while there are already lots of people actually building stuff (and yes they do know about github and VCS).

lux 14y ago

It makes a lot of sense for there to be a standardized, open framework for document management in general outside of source code. So many industries could improve their processes and transparency through tools like Git and services like GitHub, but they would need to be made a lot simpler than GitHub's UI. Their site has some great stuff going for developers, but scares away a few designers I know. I'd love to see a site/app like that get made.

unimpressive 14y ago

This is actually on my to-do list for "Things I need to do if I ever get on a state bar.".

pron 14y ago

Democracy Is for Amateurs: Why We Need More Citizen Citizens - http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/democracy-is-for-amateurs-why-we-need-more-citizen-citizens/256818/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/democrac...

farnsworth 14y ago

Neat idea, but is it currently really a problem to tell who has written what part of a law? Isn't this public information already? If not, then this isn't a technology problem, and it will not be easy to convince our congresscritters to keep track of who writes precisely what. And what about sections of law with shared credit, or law that comes from a committee that didn't unanimously agree, etc. I know very little about how law is written, but my impression is that most people who pay attention to it are more concerned about the large ideas than the exact wordings - that's how you have politicians voting on bills when they haven't read every word. How can they when it's thousands of pages long? So this might be more useful to a small number of politicians and lawyers who are examining law closely, looking for loopholes, or concerned about the exact details of a particular statement's pedigree, but I don't really see the general appeal. I would rather have a tool which provides similar information, but on a higher level. An independent overview in layman language, general information about how it came about, how it's significant historically or with respect to existing law, and with the option to drill down to the actual language and gritty details. Of course, this would take much more work to build and maintain. I've been a fan of opencongress.org but I've found that switching between opencongress and wikipedia is the most effective way to understand the context and significance of a bill. Reading the actual text of a law is usually about as useful to me for determining its implications as reading the source code of a printer driver would be to my dad for figuring out how to install a printer.

gauravk92 14y ago
Bills used to not be 1000 page tomes. Special interests usually cause that bloat by lobbying for exemptions or credits in special circumstances. There's no real reason it has to be 2000 pages, it's not going to be three pages either though.

drstrangevibes 14y ago

the documents themselves arent the problem, the real deception lies in the use of language and words of art

fidotron 14y ago
Exactly. My semi serious view is that laws should be written in Prolog.
- eurleif 14y ago
  I think there will come a time when people will look back and find it quaint and impractical that we tried to interpret our massive legal system by hand, rather than leaving that sort of thing to computers.
- polymatter 14y ago
  or how about Lojban? That way it can be machine readable, unambiguously queried, culturally neutral and actually be a language designed for human communication. (xkcd 191 comic joke notwithstanding)
- philwelch 14y ago
  I, for one, would prefer not to be imprisoned due to a bug.
  - drstrangevibes 14y ago
    many people already are, though the bugs are lexical in nature
    - philwelch 14y ago
      The difference is that you can often get a judge to say "hey, that's a bug!" and then you're released.
      - drstrangevibes 14y ago

lazerwalker 14y ago

This is a laudable idea. Unfortunately, the key challenge with the problem isn't architecting a DVCS-like service for legal documents (for an MVP, you could easily get by simply designing a novel frontend to git), it's an adoption problem. The current system is flawed, yes, but merely offering a superior product for less money isn't enough to make a dent in the bureaucratic nightmare of modern-day Washington. I'm reminded of an article I saw here on HN a few months back: http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works- http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-n...

gordianknot 14y ago
Adoption isn't the problem. We don't need Congress to use such a system initially; we need bills, the US Code, etc. mirrored on Github. When it's there, people will get it. The information is out there, it just needs to be processed into a usable form so that it works with Git. And it'd take millions of dollars, and have no conventional ROI, so no one's going to do it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Aren't bills formatted similarly? Couldn't you then just OCR them?
- lnguyen 14y ago
  There's Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php). Bill text is available in PDF, XML and a printer-friendly HTML. The question is how up-to-date the bill texts are. I doubt it can tracks in real time with changes/amendments voted on, etc. but then again any system bolted on the process as opposed to being fundamentally integrated into the process wouldn't be.
- sc68cal 14y ago
  >And it'd take millions of dollars, and have no conventional ROI, so no one's going to do it. Your pessimism is unwarranted. There is already one user on GitHub that scrapes the US Code and mirrors it. He even tags the changes so you can diff them quite easily. https://github.com/divegeek/uscode https://github.com/divegeek/uscode

rmc 14y ago

Won't change anything. It's proposing a technical solution to a people problem. Right now laws are openly available, but people don't care enough to get look into them. Also, just because you have "git blame" doesn't mean you'll now magically be able to see what corporate lobbyist wrote the law, because they'd just ask the legislator to commit it instead. Wouldn't change anything.

draggnar 14y ago
but at the same time it is kind of a technical problem. one big reason why people don't look at the laws is because they get changed all the time without a transparant way to see what ends up getting changed right before a vote. something like gitlaw would allow people, and lawyers, to track changes to laws much easier. adoption is definitely the problem, but this can help lawyers make proposals and counterproposals with the speed of software developers, which may give lawyers a reason to sign on.
- amalag 14y ago
  So it's still a people problem, a 'gitlaw' would keep track of who changed what. You would still have to find out who did what.

msgilligan 14y ago

GitLaw, if implemented, would be a significant improvement over law by gits -- which is what we have now. Unfortunately, I don't think the problem (with Congress) is technological. If GitLaw were implemented, a lobbyist wouldn't be making a pull request directly, they'd influence someone to do it for them so it wouldn't be traceable -- which is pretty much the way it works now.

dgregd 14y ago
> hey'd influence someone to do it for them so Because now there are hundreds of people to check. We don't known exactly who did what. With GitLow there will be one direct person responsible. SCM helps a lot with source code. Imagine 400 people software project without SCM.

kemiller 14y ago

I basically agree with everyone pouring cold water on this as far as reforming the statute law system is concerned. That is a much more entrenched problem than any computer system is going to solve overnight. However, I do see a niche for DIY contract law. Sort of like Nolo Press on steroids. Where you can browse standard contracts and then modify them to suit your needs in a visible and traceable way. Or possibly for contract negotiations, where each party makes changes. This would keep track of history in a neutral and verifiable way. (Could save time and errors for individuals and small law firms....)

mrweasel 14y ago

I like the idea. I've been wanting to do something similar for the laws here in Denmark, but getting good data is tricky.... Strangely enough. My reasoning is that I feel that politicians are constantly filling with existing laws and the changes are conveyed via strang legal terms, e.g. "This changes "they to us in paragraph five, section 2, line 3". This is a complete bullshit way of informing the public about the changes to our laws. If laws where tracked the same way we as developers track our code, hiding even minor changes would be impossible. Just imagine getting a daily / weekly change log for the laws passed by your government. Even our lazy journalists should be able to dig up something in appropriate every now and then if they knew what changed. Wonderful idea.

tonfa 14y ago
Most country with a codification system also publish consolidated codes, so you don't have to apply the diff yourself.

fourspace 14y ago

Great idea. Wasn't Docracy pitched as exactly this, "GitHub for legal docs"? Looks like it's morphed into something entirely different. Shame. http://docracy.com http://docracy.com

pents90 14y ago
It hasn't morphed, we just don't market it on the homepage as "GitHub for Legal Docs" since lawyers and the general public have no idea what that is. But it is open-sourced legal docs, with versioning, diffs and a Github-style ownership/branching model. John (Co-Founder of Docracy)

ynniv 14y ago

This is one of those ideas that gets suggested on a frequent basis. Those who suggest it often think that the problem is one of complexity management, like managing source code changes. The actual problem is one of power and intention. Yes, version control would make earmarks obvious. Yes, it would make tracking contributors (lobbies) easier. Yes, it would make tailoring tried and trusted legal documents easy. All of these are reasons why version control will never be applied to the law. We want these things, but we are not the customer. The real customer is actively trying to prevent these things from ever happening. The reality is that these tools are probably already being used for these exact purposes - in private, and for personal gain.

Cushman 14y ago
I agree 100%, but I think that's only the short view-- the extant governments aren't going to be around forever, and in the long run we need smart people to spend time thinking about how to structure a government that's learned from our mistakes. Of course we won't see Congress outlaw lobbying, but there's definitely an opportunity today to try some of these concepts in an organization, community, or even willing local government.
- newbie12 14y ago
  Congress can't outlaw lobbying, it is a core Constitutional right (free speech, right to assemble, right to petition govt). The problem is that the government is too big and has too much power, so the rewards for lobbying are so great.
user23409 14y ago
Thank you for your cynicism, it's super productive. Let's not discuss or try to improve upon the idea. Let's just tell him why we think he's wrong. /rant Continuing with OP's thought. Making the legislator who introduces the bill commit the bill would be an awesome piece of information and might make some legislators think twice about what they introduce and how they title it. And all the statistics that could be run on a repo of laws would be a ridiculously useful resource.

andrewcooke 14y ago

so this is designed to cut the flow of blood to american liberty? i guess i don't understand the imagery in the name?

nathanhammond 14y ago

I've dreamed up something like this as well and realistically there isn't anything preventing us from using git to manage our laws. As a strawman to beat up, here is an example of how it could work: git clone legislature/generalstatutes s/marijuana/sugar/g git commit -am "Turn sugar into a controlled substance." git request-pull Legislators If interested, # git branch bill_12345 git pull nathanhammond/generalstatutes // Continue editing the "Sugar as a controlled substance" bill. Spin off to committee (read/write to committee members) git clone legislature/generalstatutes git checkout bill_12345 // Continue editing the "Sugar as a controlled substance" bill. git commit -am "Committee updates." Take a vote for leaving committee. If successful, # git request-pull General legislature takes a vote. If successful, # git merge bill_12345 master --signoff (Legislators that voted for it.) Benefits: - Encourages broader participation in democracy. - Cryptographically signed. We'll know if you voted for or wrote it. - Tracks history of all changes (at least at the commit level). If something comes out of committee very different from how it went in you can easily find every change. - Makes it easier for newspeople to identify how the law is changing. - An interface like GitHub over top of the repository could hide all of the complexity, allow for line-by-line comments, and general comments. - Registering to the interface with your voter ID could allow for representatives to identify or poll constituents. Problems: - Requires behavioral change for legislators who I would not necessarily classify as "early adopters." - Still possible to "launder" the creator by having somebody else make the changes for you. - In place modification of the law. To this point when something is repealed it typically looks something like this: http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySection/Chapter_153/GS_153-1_through_153-382.html http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySect...

vnorby 14y ago

You can use GitHub for legal documents already. Just convert your documents to markdown. We put our TOS and Privacy Policy on Github from launch: https://github.com/everyme/everyme-legal https://github.com/everyme/everyme-legal We haven't had any issues or pull requests recently but we would welcome them for sure.

J3L2404 14y ago

It's going to be extremely difficult to refactor.

DougBTX 14y ago

For the UK, it makes me wonder how close you could get with the data here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ http://www.legislation.gov.uk/

objclxt 14y ago
Not very (I maintain a nice iPhone app that front-ends the data on legislation.gov.uk): the data on legislation.gov.uk is useful for Joe Public, but when it comes to the actual practice of the law is woefully incomplete. This is purely down to a lack of interest and funding on the Government's part, as well as vested interests by people who publish law and charge for it. There is no free source of up-to-date UK law: many of the statute on legislation.gov.uk is not guaranteed to be up to date, and if you're looking to practice this is obviously no good at all. This is in itself very sad. The people who run legislation.gov.uk do a fantastic job, and hopefully access will get much better in the future.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  >many of the statute on legislation.gov.uk is not guaranteed to be up to date // They say it's updated within 24h of publication. Which seems to be as up to date as you'll get. There are http://services.parliament.uk/bills/ http://services.parliament.uk/bills/ and http://bills.ais.co.uk/AC.asp http://bills.ais.co.uk/AC.asp for tracking bills before publication (the later one isn't working at the moment though). So for example the 1st reading in the Lords of the Online Safety Bill was on 14th May and the text can be read at http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/onlinesafety.html http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/onlinesafety.htm....

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

reinhardt 14y ago

In addition to this being first and foremost a political/people problem as many have pointed out, the technical challenges of applying standard CMS and document management solutions to legislation environments are pretty much unknown or underestimated by most of us. For those interested, Sean McGrath has posted a series of posts addressing some of these challenges: http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/xml-in-legislatureparliament.html http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/xml-in-legislaturepa...

skimmas 14y ago

Why git? Why not a Wiki?

rurounijones 14y ago
Git advantages are things better version management, branches, pulls etc Having said that you can (and do) have Wikis that are backed by git.

cies 14y ago

> It looks like there is an existing project > called Legal-RDF that was created to add > semantic data to digital legal documents, > but it’s XML and therefore not very readable. RDF has several other formats besides XML (turtle being one of the more human readable formats).

agumonkey 14y ago

Is this a recent trend in peoples mind ? Distributed versionning brings out the need to understand laws I guess.

DomKM 14y ago

Please don't actually call this GitLaw. A better name conversion would be LawHub since most lawyers have no idea what Git is.

Kiro 14y ago
LawHub could be anything while GitLaw is exactly what it says: laws versioned in git.

lomegor 14y ago

How do we start doing this? Is anyone willing to put some time to build this? Of course this would be non-profit. Maybe if we get enough people interested, we can start pressuring different organization to help us (Wikimedia comes to mind). There would be a need for people writing the laws into text and coders for implementing different aspects. Maybe crowdfunded. I don't know, just throwing ideas to see if anyone is interested. We don't need the government to do this. We have the data (or most of it). We need to start changing it from the outside.

nowarninglabel 14y ago

Relevant discussion from 3 years ago on Slashdot: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/03/06/1451216/congress-mulls-api-for-congressional-data http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/03/06/1451216/congre...

nickpinkston 14y ago

IANAL, but... Why don't we instead build a "Startup Law Standard" kind of thing that can get network effects in the startup scene. Get all the big firms law firm / VCs / angels / etc. signed on to these standards. How would this look? I've read a lot of contracts, and you see some similar stuff. In many ways, it's kind of like programming: VARIABLE DEFINITIONS: at the top - like: "'Company' shall be XYZ, Inc., a Delaware Corporation located in 100 Main St.", and so on. TESTS: These are normally "Warranties and Representations" - these are often quite boiler-plate like: "Assignor is owner of all Intellectual Property", etc. AUTHENTICATION: Signatures, etc. I bet that 80-90% documents could be generated by a set of 500 boiler-plate sections with fill-in-the-blank type of stuff. There could be built into these something that'd figure out the incompatibility (i.e. "exclusive" in one section wouldn't work with "non-exclusive" in another). Term Sheets are pretty standardized now with a couple made forms that are considered modern. Why can't we do the rest? Call me crazy, but couldn't this at the very least reduce law costs, and at best be the first step down a road of nearly full-auto law? Then again - IANAL...

rprasad 14y ago
I hate to break it to you, but most of the legal documents you pay for are already standardized. They have been for years (or decades, depending on the area of law). You're paying for the customizations that are specific to your situation. Obviously, standardized language has done nothing to reduce costs. The problem is supply-side: despite the glut of (new) lawyers, there are still not enough lawyers that people are willing to trust with their business.
- nickpinkston 14y ago
  Well I know that - I'm asking why can't it be codified more so it's more consistent and able to be interacted with. The issue with lack of "trustable" lawyers could perhaps be improved by such a tool?

gioele 14y ago

Law is a very, very, very hard task to tackle properly. You may not know but there have been three big "generations" of law systems. Many parliaments are starting to use fourth generation systems. Third and fourth generation systems look a lot like a complex git, but there are many things that should and do work differently. When I started dealing with these things I thought that it was a solved problem, just use SVN (the cool kid at the time) and everything will be solved. Well, none of the existing versioning models work well with law documents, especially acts. The general ideas do apply, but many of the details do not. For example, just think of a merge conflict: who are you so solve a merge a conflict? What you have to do is to just record the conflict and create two parallel universes, one in which the conflict has been resolved using branch A and another one in which the conflict is resolved using branch B. You then keep these two universes alive and apply all the later changes twice. You have to do this until a judge or a legal body declares one of the "branches" the correct one; this may take years and the decision reverted (even partially) many times. A few links to relevant standards and systems: * Legal XML: http://www.legalxml.org/ http://www.legalxml.org/ An OASIS working group that is merging all the relevant national standards into a worldwide standard. * Akoma Ntoso: http://www.akomantoso.org/ http://www.akomantoso.org/ A UN/DESA-sponsored format for legal documents. * CEN Metalex: http://www.leibnizcenter.org/ http://www.leibnizcenter.org/ a meta-format that acts as an exchange format between legacy formats and new systems. * LexML: http://projeto.lexml.gov.br/documentacao/resumo-em-ingles http://projeto.lexml.gov.br/documentacao/resumo-em-ingles A huge Akoma Ntoso-based repository of Brazilian laws. * ICA/SPP: http://www.ica.org/792/about-section-for-archives-of-parliaments-and-political-parties-spp/about-parliamentary-and-political-party-archives-spp.html http://www.ica.org/792/about-section-for-archives-of-parliam... The groups of archivists that deals with all the fine points you have to deal with when archiving laws and dealing with legal documents in general. The main international conference on Law and IT is Jurix, it started in 1988. Check out their proceedings to see how things evolved over time. If you are interested in hacking something related to laws or legal documents (judgements, parliamentary debate records, historical versions of laws) just get in contact with me. Disclaimer: I work in this field and I am related to some of these systems.

harshreality 14y ago
What do you do about bills which refer to existing laws, with instructions to "strike blah" and "insert foo before x in section xxx of this chapter"? Maybe it's possible to parse that and apply that sort of bill most of the time, but I'd be surprised if it were possible to do so reliably (unless natural language processing becomes a solved problem) (or perhaps I'm overestimating the complexity of legislative language and converting legislation into a patch against existing law is not a hard problem). The first step, however, could be to do revision control of bills, blind to references to existing law. Representing bills as patches to current body of law is the endgame, but I think simple revision control of bills as they wind through the legislative process would add a lot of value and would be relatively straightforward.

iandanforth 14y ago

May I suggest that code wins arguments? If this is a better way to do things, than starting with a small town that's about to incorporate could demonstrate that this could work. Not the best list of such towns, but a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities#Unbuilt_or_under_construction_planned_cities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities#Unbuilt_...

jph 14y ago

Hypothes.is is great for this -- see http://hypothes.is http://hypothes.is. "A distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site. "It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O'Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.

ap22213 14y ago
It is great for this, or it will be? I've been eagerly waiting to see what comes out of this group for a while now. The principles seem great, but I think they should apply their 12 principles to the initiation phases, as well. It's currently hard to discern from their site what their short term goals are or even where they currently are in the process. Seems like an enormously positive effort, but I'm remaining skeptical. I wish that they had more public dialogue of what they're doing and more demonstration of getting the general public involved early. Plus, I think their approach may be too grandiose and top down. I would like to see it first applied effectively at the grassroots. For instance, can the model successfully be applied to a small collective? If that's possible, then try to scale it to city, state, nation, and globe. Also, do they really need funding first to start rolling forward toward some of their objectives? There seems to be a lot of passion in this space and a lot of smart people willing to work for free now, with the right leadership.
neilk 14y ago
I don't see how hypothes.is has anything to do with this... that project seems to be about annotating any content. (And incidentally, universal annotation systems are paradigmatic chicken and egg problem; people keep trying to do this and it never reaches broad adoption). Github for law is a much more modest and realizable idea, by comparison.

lisper 14y ago

Anyone interested in this should check out: http://www.plainsite.org/ http://www.plainsite.org/

javajosh 14y ago

This can be done, and in fact there is a business in it too: an open source competitor to Lexis and Westlaw. Data entry is bound to be a problem, as no-one is going to want to give up electronic data, but I for one would be willing to spend a few hours a week transcribing documents at the local courthouse.

a3camero 14y ago
You might enjoy the free legal data service offered in Canada that has most of the cases that you can find on Westlaw/Lexis: canlii.org. It could be more open, but it's free and works well.

nerdfiles 14y ago

We need github for music.

ap22213 14y ago

Great idea, and seems to be a relatively wide-spread one, at that. But, as others have mentioned, it faces steep adoption challenges. I recommend taking a look at Rogers' 5 Factors of Adoption [1] as a starting point. It would be extremely challenging to get this approach adopted from the top down, especially in an entrenched democratic system. Instead, a less risky approach may be to first get it successfully applied at the small scale. For instance, can you get a small township/incorporation to adopt this method? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

newbusox 14y ago

This is a fine goal, however, beyond what other have said here, it's important to realize that a lot of "laws" or "rules" that impact individuals on a day to day basis are not created by Congress at all--in fact, they're created via administrative agencies through rulemaking processes (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulemaking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulemaking). This is where the "rubber meets the road" of actually implementing broadly worded language that Congress has passed, and how these rules are promulgated can be vastly different from how Congress operates. For one, administrative agency rulemaking is almost always open to public comment and, by law, these agencies are obligated to take into considerations comments left by the public. In a number of ways the process is more open and participatory than legislative law making, and, as mentioned, the regulations passed often have more of a direct impact on day to day life. There are a number of solutions out there that are attempting to make this process more transparent and participatory: for example, http://regulationroom.org/ http://regulationroom.org/ (operated by a clinic at Cornell law school). In my opinion, informing the public of the importance and participatory nature of rulemaking (and getting more people involved) is probably a more realistically achievable goal than the proposed solution, and would likely have more tangible effect.

cpeterso 14y ago

In 2007, New Zealand experimented with a public wiki to collect input for a revision to the Policing Act laws. In 2008, the wiki would be reviewed by a parliamentary committee. I'm not sure what the outcome was, but the wiki itself is now offline. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7015024.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7015024.stm

arihersh 14y ago

For anyone interested in this idea, check out legalhacks.org and join us for a hackathon at UC Hastings on May 19, to mark up legislation and discuss metadata standards for legislation. internationallegislation.eventbrite.com Having legislative markup is necessary for any git-like system, because of the complex ways that amendments are currently made. We'll be joined at the hackathon by Grant Vergottini, a member of the LegalXML OASIS committee, and the person who built the legislative editor that California uses. As many people here have commented, adoption by legislatures of [seems my earlier comment does not appear]

dlf 14y ago

Having worked on actual legislative and regulatory amendments, this would be useful simply for collating input of stakeholders. One example would be regulatory comment periods.

grantcv1 14y ago

I've been doing version management of law for 10 years. As Gioele said, (Hi Gioele!) it is a very very hard task to tackle. The problem is the 200+ years of tradition that you must drag along. In a prior life I've done version management for CAD data and software data. Those are both much simpler problems, largely because changes in procedures are so much easier when you don't have such a large legacy. As someone said, legislation is all about patching the law - although the more polite term is "amending" the law. While I have built and deployed a system to automate the generation of amendments and the compilation of law, building such a system to the more general case is mind boggling. For this to be accomplished, there is going to have to be a lot of buy-in from the legislatures themselves for they are going to have to be willing to change. That is the challenge - change at that level is a bit glacial. In the meantime, I am writing an HTML5 based legislative editor to at least get some substance behind the idea - it's at http://legalhacks.org http://legalhacks.org. I'll post a video on how it works tomorrow. It's still a bit fragile too - this stuff is hard.

dgregd 14y ago

Let's build a prototype. Kickstarter? I'm not from US but I'll donate. This is so important for all democratic countries. Then I'll vote for _any party_ which will deploy the git law system.

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habeanf 14y ago

I volunteer at the Public Knowledge Foundation (an Israeli version of The Sunlight Foundation), we develop and maintain oknesset.org (like opencongress.org). For the past couple months we've been researching the possibility of representing Israeli law as a git repository, so that oknesset.org can visualize the diff to a law a bill proposal represents, and track it as a branch until it is merged into law. Since Israel is a relatively young and small country the number of laws and changes is orders of magnitude smaller than most western/democratic countries which publicize the legislative process. Israel's legislative branch is unicameral so the process itself is relatively straightforward; supposedly we'd be a good test case. We already have quite a lot of insight but in general it seems that git (and generally, any VCS) has significant impedance mismatch with the legislative process, specifically regarding the ability to compile/link all the different laws into one comprehensive database representing the law. One prominent example is the existence of multiple timelines of ratification. There are at least three dates relevant to the ratification of bills: 1. Date of third (and final) vote = the date the parliament has voted a bill as law 2. Date of publication (for technical reasons this might not coincide with the vote date) 3. Date of validity - a bill is usually passed with a date of validity, between the date of publication and validity the bill is not formally law yet. Sometimes there are separate dates of validity for separate parts of the bill. To make matters more complicated, dates of validity can be changed when the bill designates government ministers with the authority to change them (the dates). Also, in Israel many laws never "make it" to their date of validity since the yearly Law of Arrangements (http://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/eng/hesderim_eng.htm http://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/eng/hesderim_eng.htm) decides which laws passed in the previous year have proper funding, such that officially some laws get "punted" into the future, possibly indefinitely. It gets quite confusing because from a legal point of view, the dates that are relevant to the justice system (as in, when a bill is relevant or not to the court) are usually the date of voting, whereas when it comes to government the third date is the important one. We are still moving forward with our initiative, but it seems that for now there are no version control systems which are a good solution to the law management problem. (edited for formatting)

borderbandit 14y ago

Abe, interesting idea and one I would like to run with. @nicholascloud, you make a good point about the “baby-sitting” of documents but I believe it can be resolved by crowd-sourcing the project with a “vested” membership interested in seeing the project succeed. This would also allow for controlling the abuse of the site by spammers. One part of the project would be converting the bloated material into something readable for the average participant. Because the material editor will be working on something he, or she is interested in then it would be a labor that they would happily engage in. @michael, you make a valid point but I believe a crowd-sourced vested individuals like Wikimedia would work in keeping the problems at bay. @tobi, I would suggest that the concept be kept private and not government controlled as any government initiative would only create a bureaucracy that would stifle innovation and open discourse. My country, Mexico is going through a national referendum right now with the drug war as a backdrop and part of the drama. Although it is a national election I call it a referendum because the results will give an insight into what our country wants in terms of dealing with the narco-types. Will we continue with the strategy, increase the engagement or back-off and let them do as they please? My original idea was to crowd-source political commentary/analysis but your post is making me expand the concept to include your idea. The initial countries I would like to include are the United States and Mexico as I have a basic understanding of their political processes but I would love for it to include as many countries as possible. I noticed that there is a lot of interest in this concept/idea and therefore I want to officially put out a call for those interested in forming such a site. I am willing to put up server space, domain name (polit.co) and initial programming. With Abe’s permission and hopefully, his participation I have a created a Twitter handle @polit_co to start the organizing. I look forward to everyone’s participation. Let’s get this going.

lbrdn 14y ago

We're missing the point I think. A site like this wouldn't be a way to combat lobbyist. It would be a way for citizens to become the lobbyists. If a site like this did pop up, it would eventually be dominated by a voice leaning a certain way. So, this is not a one-site-fixes-all type deal. This format could be a way for citizens to collaborate with other like-minded citizens and write legislation of their own.

saizai 14y ago

Hi everyone! I'm working on a project called http://makeyourlaws.org http://makeyourlaws.org. It's open source and non profit. Simply put, it's a practical project that aims to completely replace existing legislatures with online liquid democracies, through incremental steps within the existing legal system that have real teeth all the way. No waiting for a revolution and no begging. Read the site & its G+ page for details. In particular having a git for laws is going to be a necessary backend system — along with e.g. pretty diff, blame, mass import, in-browser editor, simple markup language for laws, etc. MYL is not git-based as it were — the policy authoring process is discussion- and voting-based, as it's a fundamentally different process than code authoring — but once it does get to being about laws, git is a good model. There are of course also a number of other subprojects within MYL, like legal identity verification, empathy-creating discussion systems, factchecking, privacy-preserving voter-verifiable auditable-in-aggregate cryptographic vote proofs, etc etc. If you're interested in working on git-law, or online liquid democracy in general, please contact me either by email to makeyourlaws@saizai.com or posting a comment at https://plus.google.com/100183759660923071401/posts/NQVuM65jZqp https://plus.google.com/100183759660923071401/posts/NQVuM65j... We're making it happen.