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German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

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Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#31

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

slt2021 wrote: post #29

I would love to see more governments operate on a Git-first basis, so that each and every decision/contribution can be tracked online for transparency. For example in USA we would have budget ceiling crisis, and both parties try to ram through a law to bump up the debt ceiling "to prevent government shutdown". It is being sold as a measure to keep government afloat and running, and is usually ran through pre-holiday…

If I were putting government procedure on a blockchain, I'd want something stronger than SHA1 for the edges.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#32

Post by daedrdev »

slt2021 wrote: post #29

I would love to see more governments operate on a Git-first basis, so that each and every decision/contribution can be tracked online for transparency. For example in USA we would have budget ceiling crisis, and both parties try to ram through a law to bump up the debt ceiling "to prevent government shutdown". It is being sold as a measure to keep government afloat and running, and is usually ran through pre-holiday…

This is because the budget is the only bill of significance that passes in the US in many terms

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#33

Post by kuschku »

throw310822 wrote: post #24
bjourne wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It exists. The "commits" to the legal code is published in a government gazette: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_gazette The current laws are just the tip of the main branch. In theory you could run a git blame and find out exactly which update inserted which specific words into the code. There is even branches in case of state succession, like the breakup of the USSR.

> The "commits" to the legal code is published in a government gazette ... The current laws are just the tip of the main branch Unfortunately I think those commits are the laws (depending on the country, of course, speaking for the cases I know). There isn't, except in a few cases, a notion of documents those commits are applied to -the commits are applied to previous commits. It doesn't make a difference functionall…

That's the primary difference between common law and civil law countries.

In Germany for example, there are regular laws (if you need to know what's legal and what not, these are the ones you read) and change laws (Änderungsgesetze), which usually read like

"Law XYZ, Paragraph 5a, Sentence 3 is changed to read as follows: '...', Sentence 7 is appended with '...', Sentence 8 is removed"

So at any time, you've got a clear set of laws that apply.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#34

Post by dh5 »

refulgentis wrote: post #30
slt2021 wrote: post #29

I would love to see more governments operate on a Git-first basis, so that each and every decision/contribution can be tracked online for transparency. For example in USA we would have budget ceiling crisis, and both parties try to ram through a law to bump up the debt ceiling "to prevent government shutdown". It is being sold as a measure to keep government afloat and running, and is usually ran through pre-holiday…

I don't want to be mean or assert without evidence, but, I'm not really sure how to respond: #2 simply doesn't happen, or even close, and it's also not a common partisan interpretation I'm being smug about. It's just flat out wrong, both parties don't try to ram a bill through, the government actually does shut down, and there's no calendar association.

I believe there actually often is a calendar association but only because the US fiscal year starts October 1st, and funding legislation needs to be enacted before then.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#35

Post by codedokode »

I remember reading about someone simply adding legal texts to git. This is pretty much useless. I think that people who do this never saw a commercial legal database (or how it is called).

What one usually need, is for example, to have cross-references, i.e. when a law contains phrase like "the certification is issued by a relevant authority", you want to have the "relevant authority" wrapped in a hyperlink pointing to an government order that designates that authority. Also, you typically want to have links to court cases related to some paragraph near it etc. If some change is planned to the law you want to have a note in the text like "this is going to change on September, 1", etc.

Given that many countries have local laws, you might want to be able to filter by a place.

Github might be used for storing raw documents as some weird kind of a database, but it is useless for actually trying to find out the answers to legal questions.

To make an analogy, reading laws on Github is like reading source code without syntax highlighting and navigation.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#36

Post by adastra22 »

codedokode wrote: post #35

I remember reading about someone simply adding legal texts to git. This is pretty much useless. I think that people who do this never saw a commercial legal database (or how it is called). What one usually need, is for example, to have cross-references, i.e. when a law contains phrase like "the certification is issued by a relevant authority", you want to have the "relevant authority" wrapped in a hyperlink pointing…

Isn’t that a different concern?

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#37

Post by ekianjo »

slt2021 wrote: post #29

I would love to see more governments operate on a Git-first basis, so that each and every decision/contribution can be tracked online for transparency. For example in USA we would have budget ceiling crisis, and both parties try to ram through a law to bump up the debt ceiling "to prevent government shutdown". It is being sold as a measure to keep government afloat and running, and is usually ran through pre-holiday…

> can be tracked online for transparency

Government and officials will fight to the teeth to avoid accountability and transparency because that's where the money and power is.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#38

Post by codedokode »

adastra22 wrote: post #36
codedokode wrote: post #35

I remember reading about someone simply adding legal texts to git. This is pretty much useless. I think that people who do this never saw a commercial legal database (or how it is called). What one usually need, is for example, to have cross-references, i.e. when a law contains phrase like "the certification is issued by a relevant authority", you want to have the "relevant authority" wrapped in a hyperlink pointing…

Isn’t that a different concern?

Technically yes, but you can see below that there are several comments about exactly this, i.e. adding raw legal texts into git.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#39

Post by adastra22 »

kuschku wrote: post #33
throw310822 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "commits" to the legal code is published in a government gazette ... The current laws are just the tip of the main branch Unfortunately I think those commits are the laws (depending on the country, of course, speaking for the cases I know). There isn't, except in a few cases, a notion of documents those commits are applied to -the commits are applied to previous commits. It doesn't make a difference functionall…

That's the primary difference between common law and civil law countries. In Germany for example, there are regular laws (if you need to know what's legal and what not, these are the ones you read) and change laws (Änderungsgesetze), which usually read like "Law XYZ, Paragraph 5a, Sentence 3 is changed to read as follows: '...', Sentence 7 is appended with '...', Sentence 8 is removed" So at any time, you've got a cl…

That’s now what he’s talking about. He is talking about a history of the edits laws in the process of becoming law.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#40

Post by fashion-at-cost »

LorenDB wrote: post #25
nikeee wrote: post #16

There are also a repository containing some laws in markdown format on GitHub. They even used PRs for actual changes proposed by the parties in the parliament. Also, the commits have their proper date, so you can `git blame` on the laws and even see which president signed-off that change. Sadly, it is unmaintained. https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

See also the US Constitution in GitHub: https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution

Nice. I kinda wish they went all the way and modified the commit details to have the actual authoring dates for each amendment/etc. Anyone know how well git plays with pre-epoch timestamps?
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