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How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

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Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#91

Post by will_brown »

gammateam wrote: post #61
will_brown wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an example of a platform like what you describe if not exactly, for the Delaware legislature. I am linking to a particular law I followed from inception to passage, an amendment to the Delaware limited liability company Act allowing company records to be kept on Blockchain. https://legis.delaware.gov/BillDetail/26554 You get the name of the Sponsor and co sponsors, additional sponsors, sign status, next steps…

Existing platforms have limitations My main problem is that many laws are written as: “Hereby strikes section b of USC1788(1)(iii) and replaced the word or with and” And with this kind of system it would be standardized already on how to see what the modifications look like, or at least jump to that old version of the law easily When the final laws are all merged together after a passed bill makes simple instructions…

So the bill I linked to includes a link to a PDF of the original bill which passed, if on the other hand there were changes you would see a pdf for each version of the bill.

Florida has a search function for their statutes that allows you to then select the year/version of the law. If the Law was amended in a given year in the annotations there are “redline versions” of the law pre amendment, with changes and final.

So again similar to what you describe but as you say...limitations to existing systems. Obviously standardization is also another problem, it would be hard enough to work with federal code and 50 states but the reality is each county and city/municipality can have their own bodies of laws, rules, regulations and ordinances...so thousands of bodies of law, in the US alone.

Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#92

Post by kortex »

pbw wrote: post #88

I wrote this a while ago: http://www.kmeme.com/2010/03/healthcare-diff.html I wonder how well code-style line-oriented diffs work for laws. If you word wrap then your single-line changes can cascade and effect many lines. If you don’t word wrap seems like you need a better way to see diffs within long lines. Seems totally solvable, but that what github does for code might not be right. But this is so awesome, pull re…

Wikipedia seems to handle this just fine, as does most markdowns. Manual word wrapping seems like more of an issue for code than plaintext. I don't manually wrap readme's anymore, that's what window-width-aware editors are for.

Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#93

Post by gibsons77 »

rumcajz wrote: post #74

While this is a great development, hosting AUTHORITATIVE text of the law at a private service (GitHub, owned by Microsoft) doesn't sound like a good idea. Consider what would happen if Microsoft decided to delete the repo. There will still be copies of the law at different places, but there would no authoritative version. Imagine a lawsuit where each party is arguing that their copy of the law is the "correct" one.

There's a way to store this in an immutable and trustless manor, but the B word gets a lot of push back around here.

Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#94

Post by karmelapple »

bytematic wrote: post #29
gammateam wrote: post #25

I'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…

I would love to see a constitution drafted for a fictional country.

Not a constitution, but I did a little something like this for the Declaration of Independence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12021461

Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#95

Post by ataturk »

gammateam wrote: post #25

I'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…

I want laws to automatically expire after say, 10 years. Make legislators re-justify everything all the time.

As far as git pull requests, I'm a bit skeptical. It's kind of like writing laws in pencil, isn't it? But to find and fix errors it would be all right.

Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#96

Post by acdha »

gibsons77 wrote: post #93
rumcajz wrote: post #74

While this is a great development, hosting AUTHORITATIVE text of the law at a private service (GitHub, owned by Microsoft) doesn't sound like a good idea. Consider what would happen if Microsoft decided to delete the repo. There will still be copies of the law at different places, but there would no authoritative version. Imagine a lawsuit where each party is arguing that their copy of the law is the "correct" one.

There's a way to store this in an immutable and trustless manor, but the B word gets a lot of push back around here.

That's because Git already provides the same solutions for problems which exist in reality (immutability, trustless, distributed). All that's left out is the opportunity for some grifter to [if we're lucky] match it at substantially greater cost.

Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#97

Post by dgreisen »

616c wrote: post #72
dgreisen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have internal systems that allow us to audit/authenticate the repository. We will be deploying a cryptographic authentication framework based on TUF in Q1 2019 that will make it possible for _anybody_ to audit/authenticate the repository.

Is this in the context of the DC law repos chronicled here? If we are DC local how can we get involved?

It is. Ping me at dgreisen (at) openlawlib.org if you're interested in helping out.

Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#98

Post by skohan »

speleding wrote: post #90
skohan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much in favor of leveraging the advantages of version control software for legal text. Git seems perfect for this, but GitHub is a terrible choice to host it. Surely we don't want a large corporation owning the platform on which our laws are enshrined. It seems like it would be much better for this to be self-hosted.

Github does not own git, it only owns the UI that they've built on top of it. You can simply clone the repo and take it somewhere else and you can find an open source UI replacement to put on top too (e.g. Gitlab). Github is free to use for open source projects, self-hosting by the government would only make it more expensive for the tax payer.

> Github ... owns the UI that they've built on top of it

That's the problem though. In principal, if they only use pure-git operations in the process, it would be easy to move at any point. But if they leverage the entire Github platform, i.e. PR discussion, issue tracking etc, then important parts of the legal history will be bound to the github platform.

And that's not great. Github is free for public projects for now, but as with any publicly traded tech company, they're able to change the terms of use of their product at any time to suit the needs of the company.

When we're talking about enshrining the laws of society, we're talking about a very long-term proposition. Technology companies pivot and or kill products all the time. What if we decided to record legislative history on Google Flow?

Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#99

Post by nathan_long »

gamblor956 wrote: post #36
gammateam wrote: post #25

I'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.

> Real time access to laws as they are drafted is a Really Bad Idea. Good ideas need time to incubate.

Good point, but if they used a distributed version control system, lawmakers could have any number of private repositories on which to craft laws before they're merged to the public master repo.

(I wouldn't expect lawmakers themselves to use git, of course; their staff would do this for them.)

Re: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

#100

Post by jasonh3 »

It's great that DC is making their latest laws available to everyone, however it's a little scary that the commits aren't signed, meaning that anyone who gained access to the github repo could forge them (and do more than fixing typos).

Hopefully DC (and others) will look at doing GPG signatures[0,1] so that they don't have to trust github's authentication as much. Github has a nice GUI that reflects signatures with the "Verified" tag, which you can see at[2].

0: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work

1: https://help.github.com/articles/signing-commits/

2: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-doc/commits/master

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