Interesting visualisation! On mobile there seems to be an issue with the months where they all display as one word instead of being spaced out: JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
71–80 of 179 posts
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#72There 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
I usually convert to markdown from PDF local laws when I need them as a reference for the functional specification. That way its easier to pinpoint to exact section of the thing.
Its not easy to convert general law to markdown, it involved online converters and manual fixes. Currently experimenting with marker [1] on local LLM hardware and so far it is the best out there.
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#73I 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.
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Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#74There 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
I maintain a repository with all German legal acts which is up to date:
https://github.com/jandinter/gesetze-im-internet
I scrape the official website (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de) once a week. The repository contains the "official" XML files with a formatting that is more focussed on presentation than on the logical structure of the legal acts, unfortunately (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/dtd/1.01/gii-norm.dtd).
Some time ago, someone from the digital service of Germany reached out and asked about my use case. Maybe there will be an official version of a "Git law" repo someday...
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#75I 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…
How would using git prevent what you’re talking about? Instead of one congressman proposing a bill with thousands of pages he hasn’t read, he’ll submit a pull request with one commit whose content is thousands of pages he hasn’t read. What difference does it make?
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#76I 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…
> and how is bipartisan consensus is being achieved in real-time
This is a horrible idea in practice because everything that is public and open turns into a purity test.
You need people to be able to negotiate with each other in order for consensus to be established, and negotiations only work if the negotiators give up on something that they want to get something else. The moment you make this public all that you get is people turning negotiations into a way to generate soundbites and scared of doing any actual work because they'll just give ammunition to their opponents.
This is doubly bad in the US with the primary systems which makes legislators even more vulnerable to attacks from their flanks.
Legislators are not elected to be proxies for the voters, that's not how it's supposed to work. They're elected to use their judgement, that's why there usually aren't recall elections or restrictions on how they can vote etc.
As a matter of fact I'm of the opinion politics everywhere would be a lot better if plenaries, committees and hearings were not recorded or televised in the first place. I'm ok with minutes being made available but I'm convinced without being able to clip soundbites or tiktoks out of every meeting legislatures would be a lot more productive. Definitely more so than if we attached a camera crew to everyone in politics for "transparency"
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's outdated and not fit for use in adversarial contexts: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/announcing-first-sha... Most git repos are not adversarial, so they get away with using it. A malicious commit which put a loop or a fork in your commit history would just be rejected--if not by the software, then by the maintainer. But if you're tracking the state of some legal procedure in congress or whatever…
I thought the explanation was that SHA1 collision attacks on git repositories weren’t feasible, not that we don’t care about people sneaking things into our git repositories.
I did a bit of research (landed here: https://marc.info/?l=git&m=115678778717621&w=2). It's not that
> we don’t care about people sneaking things into our git repositories
But rather that in the event of a collision, git would not sneak the attacker's malicious code into your repo. The best such an attacker can expect to achieve is to create confusion. In a project-maintainer scenario, that probably just means rejecting the PR--hardly an outcome that would justify spending the money on the hash collision in the first place.
In a we're-voting-on-whether-or-not-to-change-the-law scenario, confusion about the outcome of the vote could have dire enough consequences that an adversary might indeed care enough to bother with the calculation.
That's not to say that this is the only way in which git would be a bad choice, it's just the first that came to mind.
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#78I 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…
> Public needs to know who when and how is adding these lines and how is bipartisan consensus is being achieved in real-time, not post-factum.
This is what the press and various independent groups already do. They have people that pour through the stuff, as well as getting tips and press releases from congressional reps and third party interest groups. It's just that there's only so much they can cover, and most of the public can't be bothered to do more than turn on the evening news.
There's a lot of good, in-depth journalism out there. You just have to look a bit harder for it.
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#79There 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
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Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've never understood a strong distinction between common law and civil law. Seems like the only difference is that common law is supposed to involve stronger deference to judicial precedent, although clearly it's not absolute.
As far as I understand it's because in practice there is no one using pure common or pure civil law
Pure common law would be the complete absence of a separate legislature. Everything would be just layers of judicial decisions
Pure civil law systems would have judges always ruling exclusively on the case in front of them based exclusively on the text of the laws. But in practice especially at the higher level of the courts and especially in matters of constitutionality or higher laws you have a certain deference to precedence