How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by giobox » Tue, Nov 27, 2018, 12:52 AM UTC

dalore wrote: post #113

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.

Git is decentralized so it doesn't really matter where it's hosted. Github works since it's free, but everyone who checks out the source will have the full git history and so also becomes another repository. Easy to move a git repo to somewhere else.

While this can be argued to be true of git in a technical sense, virtually all git projects in practice have a central source of truth repository. GitHub’s entire business model is largely predicated on the fact projects will use it as their primary repository.

If we are talking about accepting PRs for drafting legislation in git, where it is hosted and who hosts it becomes extremely important. Sure anyone can clone/fork, but only the appointed central repo could become law. A clone that you or I make will likely never have this ability.

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

#122

Post by bostonvaulter2 » Tue, Nov 27, 2018, 12:56 AM UTC

grkvlt wrote: post #63

dgreisen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are in talks with several international governments. We would be delighted to help your country! The system does not in any way change the legislative process, so you cannot use a pull request to make any substantive change to the law. That would include rewording, changing punctuation, fixing numbering, etc. If such a pull request were made, it would be immediately closed. As throughout history, the only way to m…

So, essentially, the pull request process is useless. In fact, even changing a typo could be seen as a substantive change since it may not always be 100% clear what the correct change is. For example, in the Colored Object Restrictions Act 2018, Section 12.3.7 it might say "It is not permitted to have purple colored caqs within the city limits." could be talking about 'cats', 'cars' or maybe 'caps', and although it's…

Come on, you gotta start somewhere.

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

#123

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 27, 2018, 1:00 AM UTC

gammateam wrote: post #118

azernik wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The California legislature has this feature - the default landing page gives you that legal diff format, but if you hit the "Today's Law as Amended" tab you get a handy word-oriented diff: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...

Nice! I would like to move the goal post a BIT further, and also have annotations of case law that actually used any of those clauses.

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by dalore » Tue, Nov 27, 2018, 12:11 PM UTC

giobox wrote: post #121

dalore wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is decentralized so it doesn't really matter where it's hosted. Github works since it's free, but everyone who checks out the source will have the full git history and so also becomes another repository. Easy to move a git repo to somewhere else.

While this can be argued to be true of git in a technical sense, virtually all git projects in practice have a central source of truth repository. GitHub’s entire business model is largely predicated on the fact projects will use it as their primary repository. If we are talking about accepting PRs for drafting legislation in git, where it is hosted and who hosts it becomes extremely important. Sure anyone can clone/…

Yes, need to agree on a central place to push/pull and create PRs from. But my point is that right now people are using GitHub but if any point they want to change, or GitHub go down (or change licensing etc), they aren't beholden to them. Just push the git repository to somewhere else and agree to that. Other developers would confirm the git repo is the same.