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I saw a TED Talk [0] a while back about how Git could transform the legislative process and help bring transparency to how our laws are formed. I've known abou

I saw a TED Talk [0] a while back about how Git could transform the legislative process and help bring transparency to how our laws are formed. I've known about the TPP for a while. I tried to discuss it with people and no one had even heard of it. What if we had a Github-esque site where all of our legislation (and all revisions) are readily available with annotations. Would society be more interested in participating in the creation of our laws? I know I would be. [0] http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_o...

pizza234 12y ago
Well, it depends on which problem one wants to attack. In this case the problem is transparency; in a world where git would be the primary legislative tool, TTIP and TPP would be stored in private git repositories. On a related note, I remember somebody qualified in the field, who wrote here on HN how a version control tool would not be an appropriate tool to develop laws (since they are not developed like software), but unfortunately I can't find the thread.
- leesalminen 12y ago
  Interesting point. There are a multitude of issues with our current system of governing a society. If the government were properly incentivized to bring transparency to our legislative process, why would this be stored in a private repo? Even if it were, every revision to every line would be stored and traced back to an individual author. In this case, the contents of TPP will be made public 4 years after executing the agreement. At that time, anyone would be able to scrutinize who wrote what when. This could be the proper incentive to House/Senate members to work in favor of their constituents. Politics is a career today - they don't want to screw that gravy train up.
  - pgeorgi 12y ago
    That "make public" part would probably be a copy out of the private repo and "git add" to the canonical one. No history except "first version".
rayiner 12y ago
I think it's unappreciated the extent to which Congress has been doing version control long before programming existed. Public laws (i.e. commits) are written as amendments (i.e. diffs) to the United States Code. When a bill is voted into law, they are accompanied by reports in the Congressional Record (i.e. commit messages) explaining the rationale of the changes. And it's all documented with decades of CSPAN footage. The biggest missing piece is the United States Code Annotated. It has notes showing for each provision the public laws that changed it (like svn log). Unfortunately, this information is collected and maintained by West and Lexis in proprietary databases. But everything else is out there and web-accessible.
- leesalminen 12y ago
  I think there is a lot more work to do before calling this web-accessible. As the classic goes, if my mother can't find it and use it without assistance it's not ready.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  It's not even a Congressional thing! Other legislatures have long done the same (for example, the Parliament of England, later the Parliament of the UK). A modern example: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/30/contents http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/30/contents
- beagle3 12y ago
  The rationale might be explained in the commit message, but it seems courts never refer to it, preferring instead to reverse engineer the meaning from the compiled code(law). The rationale for the PATRIOT act was to fight terrorism. The rationale for copyright extension was ... well, there was some gooblydock. But the courts never seem to reference that when they actually apply these laws.
  - hawkice 12y ago
PeterWhittaker 12y ago
A Github-esque site is insufficient, and may be unnecessary. What would be necessary is some form of compiler or preprocessor to sort through legislation - and regulation, unless one has a civil code, e.g., Louisiana or Québec, one need consider regulation, and precedent - and pump out warnings and errors re contradictions, inconsistencies, edge cases, etc. Yes, there is a degree of "all bugs are shallow" if the legs and regs, etc., are in a system with full histories, diffs, etc., and some form of PR support, but that would be insufficient, given the sheer bulk of the body of law. This is a major reason why budget bills, e.g., take so long to enact: A simple mandate might be easily stated in a clear, clean, crisp English-language sentence, but now that statement needs to parsed and assessed in the context of hundreds of interrelated legs and regs. Humans do that now and it is long, dreary labour for well-trained professionals who know how the body of law works and know, to a degree, what can be ignored, left unstated, or need be stated very clearly indeed. Now we want to add thousands of untrained folk like you and I? Hmm, we'll need a really good compiler, and we'll need a Linus or a Theo or two, semi-benevolent highly-opinionated gatekeepers to manage our promotion from the equivalent of low hanging fruit utilities (minor changes to clearly-defined administrative regulations, e.g.) through to the equivalent of kernel space (major social programs, drug legalization, etc., etc.).
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  A more formal way to write laws and statically analyse them is a common dream of programmers, me included. But it's unclear how you'd even start to do that. It seems like an AI-hard problem. The Bitcoin community is starting to explore the idea of formalised software contracts, but they're all very basic and it's all very early days.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
First of all, how is Git itself instrumental to this scheme? The idea is a very simple one that has been echoed by many due to how straightforward it is. Laws under a collaborative software hosting site. The most likely outcome is that it'll end up a purely symbolic manifestation of "open government" much like whitehouse.gov is. It'll be flooded with queries and discussion that are red herrings. The fast pace at which laws end up being revised will prove difficult for parties to catch up with. Yet if the pace is too slow and the focus too selective or narrow, then it will be deemed inefficient. Besides, the sheer complexity of the legal codex will mean most people will be unable to participate to begin with.
ilurk 12y ago
Maybe you'll find this relevant http://democracyos.org/ http://democracyos.org/ https://www.change.org/ https://www.change.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/
whoopdedo 12y ago
> What if we had a Github-esque site where all of our legislation (and all revisions) are readily available with annotations. It would be attacked with a DDOS from China and ordinary citizens shut out of the legislative process anyway.

pizza234 12y ago

Well, it depends on which problem one wants to attack. In this case the problem is transparency; in a world where git would be the primary legislative tool, TTIP and TPP would be stored in private git repositories. On a related note, I remember somebody qualified in the field, who wrote here on HN how a version control tool would not be an appropriate tool to develop laws (since they are not developed like software), but unfortunately I can't find the thread.

leesalminen 12y ago
Interesting point. There are a multitude of issues with our current system of governing a society. If the government were properly incentivized to bring transparency to our legislative process, why would this be stored in a private repo? Even if it were, every revision to every line would be stored and traced back to an individual author. In this case, the contents of TPP will be made public 4 years after executing the agreement. At that time, anyone would be able to scrutinize who wrote what when. This could be the proper incentive to House/Senate members to work in favor of their constituents. Politics is a career today - they don't want to screw that gravy train up.
- pgeorgi 12y ago
  That "make public" part would probably be a copy out of the private repo and "git add" to the canonical one. No history except "first version".

rayiner 12y ago

I think it's unappreciated the extent to which Congress has been doing version control long before programming existed. Public laws (i.e. commits) are written as amendments (i.e. diffs) to the United States Code. When a bill is voted into law, they are accompanied by reports in the Congressional Record (i.e. commit messages) explaining the rationale of the changes. And it's all documented with decades of CSPAN footage. The biggest missing piece is the United States Code Annotated. It has notes showing for each provision the public laws that changed it (like svn log). Unfortunately, this information is collected and maintained by West and Lexis in proprietary databases. But everything else is out there and web-accessible.

leesalminen 12y ago
I think there is a lot more work to do before calling this web-accessible. As the classic goes, if my mother can't find it and use it without assistance it's not ready.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
It's not even a Congressional thing! Other legislatures have long done the same (for example, the Parliament of England, later the Parliament of the UK). A modern example: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/30/contents http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/30/contents
beagle3 12y ago
The rationale might be explained in the commit message, but it seems courts never refer to it, preferring instead to reverse engineer the meaning from the compiled code(law). The rationale for the PATRIOT act was to fight terrorism. The rationale for copyright extension was ... well, there was some gooblydock. But the courts never seem to reference that when they actually apply these laws.
- hawkice 12y ago

PeterWhittaker 12y ago

A Github-esque site is insufficient, and may be unnecessary. What would be necessary is some form of compiler or preprocessor to sort through legislation - and regulation, unless one has a civil code, e.g., Louisiana or Québec, one need consider regulation, and precedent - and pump out warnings and errors re contradictions, inconsistencies, edge cases, etc. Yes, there is a degree of "all bugs are shallow" if the legs and regs, etc., are in a system with full histories, diffs, etc., and some form of PR support, but that would be insufficient, given the sheer bulk of the body of law. This is a major reason why budget bills, e.g., take so long to enact: A simple mandate might be easily stated in a clear, clean, crisp English-language sentence, but now that statement needs to parsed and assessed in the context of hundreds of interrelated legs and regs. Humans do that now and it is long, dreary labour for well-trained professionals who know how the body of law works and know, to a degree, what can be ignored, left unstated, or need be stated very clearly indeed. Now we want to add thousands of untrained folk like you and I? Hmm, we'll need a really good compiler, and we'll need a Linus or a Theo or two, semi-benevolent highly-opinionated gatekeepers to manage our promotion from the equivalent of low hanging fruit utilities (minor changes to clearly-defined administrative regulations, e.g.) through to the equivalent of kernel space (major social programs, drug legalization, etc., etc.).

mike_hearn 12y ago
A more formal way to write laws and statically analyse them is a common dream of programmers, me included. But it's unclear how you'd even start to do that. It seems like an AI-hard problem. The Bitcoin community is starting to explore the idea of formalised software contracts, but they're all very basic and it's all very early days.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

First of all, how is Git itself instrumental to this scheme? The idea is a very simple one that has been echoed by many due to how straightforward it is. Laws under a collaborative software hosting site. The most likely outcome is that it'll end up a purely symbolic manifestation of "open government" much like whitehouse.gov is. It'll be flooded with queries and discussion that are red herrings. The fast pace at which laws end up being revised will prove difficult for parties to catch up with. Yet if the pace is too slow and the focus too selective or narrow, then it will be deemed inefficient. Besides, the sheer complexity of the legal codex will mean most people will be unable to participate to begin with.

ilurk 12y ago

Maybe you'll find this relevant http://democracyos.org/ http://democracyos.org/ https://www.change.org/ https://www.change.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/

whoopdedo 12y ago

> What if we had a Github-esque site where all of our legislation (and all revisions) are readily available with annotations. It would be attacked with a DDOS from China and ordinary citizens shut out of the legislative process anyway.