This is neat as long as DC sticks to a policy of open source laws and free access. Github has always done this, but I fear that 50 years from now we could be in a situation like access to case law where you have to pay a third party to read.
How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
31–40 of 124 posts
Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
#32This is great, I would also love to see laws have applicable test cases created. For a practical example, in NJ they recently changed gun laws, and they forgot to include an exemption for police officers, so they ended up being restricted by the new laws the same way civilians are. (I really bit my tongue on this, not going to get political, here).
The law should have had a test case created, which would have the equivalent of ensuring that police officers are not in violation of the law, when they are serving active duty, or going home. NJ’s assembly had to rush in some middle of the night legislation to fix this “bug” in the law, that nobody caught.
I would love to see this applied to all laws. As the article states, software and law have a lot in common. Testing should be one of them.
Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
#33On one side it makes sense to have a public repository like git used for this, but having a private company being responsible for this it's bit strange. The fact that a pull request was accepted was now that strange because it could have been done by the council representative. For this kind of use case it would make more sense to me some sort of block chain, not controlled by a single company. "This isn’t a copy of…
Why would you use a blockchain? There's already a central authority - the DC city government. They should just host their own git instance.
There are cases in history where records offices were held in rebellion for political purposes. A blockchain would change means of control of records from violence to compute power.
Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
#34This is great, I would also love to see laws have applicable test cases created. For a practical example, in NJ they recently changed gun laws, and they forgot to include an exemption for police officers, so they ended up being restricted by the new laws the same way civilians are. (I really bit my tongue on this, not going to get political, here). The law should have had a test case created, which would have the equ…
Testing requires laws to be defined in a language understandable to machines and to be unambiguous. That’s not gonna happen anytime soon.
Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
#35Hi all, I'm a co-founder of Open Law Library, the non-profit that built the platform DC uses to codify and publish their laws. We were so excited when we saw a member of the public make a PR. I'm happy to answer any questions.
Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
#36I've been wanting this for a long time, I wanted to take it further though: I want draft laws, I want to see all representatives as contributors and be able to see their contributions and changes to draft laws. the House should have a master branch that submits pull requests to another repository, the other chamber having one too The Governor/President gets to approve PR's from that jurisdiction It would become SUPER…
They have what you describe, and moreover such a thing has existed in paper form since th this country was formed.
Real time access to laws as they are drafted is a Really Bad Idea. Good ideas need time to incubate. The system you want would lead to the sound byte version of legislating.
Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you use a blockchain? There's already a central authority - the DC city government. They should just host their own git instance.
I'm willing to bet GH is being mirrored internally as you suggest otherwise you'd be exposing the only current digital copy to hackers. That just seems a reasonable expectation to me. So the activity is likely happening on the larger and more exposed GH service, while internally there is a daily copy bring backed up that isn't (as) exposed to hackers. Something life that would be a great way to displace risk.
But thats not how git works. Everyone who uses the repo has a copy of it. Even if you hack GH the worst possible outcome is a hard reset of the repo, which would break pulls anyway. Unless a literal city council thinks its a good idea to not have local copies of their own law source code they are modifying regularly or something.
Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Judging from screenshots, the person who accepted the change was on the DC City Council.
Still, not the Mayor. And, did it unilaterally, inviting abuse.
If you want to abuse the law doing so in a public ledger that anyone accessing has a copy of (such that just reverting commits on github doesn't remove from them everyones histories) seems like a really unwise way of going about it.
Whats important is having eyes on what changes are made, and if you want to track changes and revisions to something... github (and gitlab, phabricator, etc) is pretty close to the optimization of that problem humanity has developed up to this point.
Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
#39> My edit wasn’t substantive. This sort of “technical correction,” as lawyers would call it, didn’t need to be passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor. Okay, so they didn't "change the law." It's a cool story but not a fan of clickbait titles either.
As with most things in the law, it is complicated. The District legislative process shares many similarities to the federal government's. They pass laws, which are the official representation of the will of the Council. These laws are kinda like hand-crafted change sets. Change sets that can change other change sets.
These change sets are almost impossible to use as they are, so the Council creates an official compilation of all the change sets as applied and organized by subject. This is the Code of the District of Columbia. Usually, when people think about "the law" they are thinking about the code, because that is how people interact with it.
The laws as passed by the Council cannot (and should not) be changed via pull request. Here, the useful representation of those laws, the representation used by everybody who actually interacts with the law, has been updated via PR to more perfectly reflect the underlying laws.
Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
#40On one side it makes sense to have a public repository like git used for this, but having a private company being responsible for this it's bit strange. The fact that a pull request was accepted was now that strange because it could have been done by the council representative. For this kind of use case it would make more sense to me some sort of block chain, not controlled by a single company. "This isn’t a copy of…
Github is just the storage medium. It's a bit like saying that the paper on which the law is printed may not be produced by a private company, which of course, doesn't make sense.
Paper -> Git. I don't think anyone has any problem with using Git as a medium.
The only bookstore chain where you can find the trusted, canonical copy of the book -> GitHub.
The government should host the canonical copy itself. Then, and only then, it can be replicated to any other commercial service willing to host a mirror. Be it GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, sr.ht or anything else. Git architecture is so well suited for it that it's particularly striking to not see it done there.