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German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

abstimmung.eu

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Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#151

Post by Liquix »

trashchomper wrote: post #51
yallpendantools wrote: post #46

Sorry it might be my turn on the Dunce hat but what is so "Git" here other than the contribution calendar popularized by Github then copied by Gitlab?

I feel like you answered your own question... Like I get it, but English is fluid and is it really that far to make the assumptive leap from "git" to "github/lab/service", seems pretty clear what they meant (even if it's not completely/technically/um-actually correct because git != github).

to be fair, git != github is an important distinction that many fail to grasp. we had a manager who conflated the two, meetings were peppered with things like "do a github pull", "will he be able to log in to the repository on his new machine", "i can't find any good tutorials on setting up a git wiki", etc.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#153

Post by maxekman »

AlexChalakov wrote: post #147
maxekman wrote: post #134

Awesome! I was thinking about implementing something similar for the Swedish government APIs to improve transparency and knowledge of the democratic processes. I wonder how easy it is to adopt this project to that?

I've been wanting to do smth similar for the Bulgarian government for some time now. Let us know if you try to undertake this project

Good idea! I’ll look into the code and check how extendable it is.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#155

Post by codedokode »

eru wrote: post #122
codedokode wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git/github doesn' provide "Go to definition" and original post was about uselessness of committing law texts into git.

Let's leave github out of the discussion. That's a completely different beast. (And funny enough, github does provide 'go to definition' for some languages.) So my point was that git is obviously useful for source code of programs. And as you point out, git does not provide 'go to definition' for source code of programs. Hence I suggest that the inability of git to provide cross-references in legal text is about as r…

Git is unnecessary here anyway.

Git is useful for collaboration of multiple people on the same project. Is law making a collaboration? Typically there is a single person which signs the bill into a law. But there is collaboration during work on the bill, though.

But I do not think that people who make laws want to write git commands in the console. They want the GUI (ideally integrated into Microsoft Word). And if we are making GUI why not drop git and use a traditional relational database for storing the data?

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#157

Post by YmiYugy »

bjourne wrote: post #19
YmiYugy wrote: post #13

This is nice, but it would be great to see some more features from VCS applied to laws, e.g. git blame and git log.

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.

Yeah, but at least in Germany they are a textual description of a diff, not something I can use in a standard diff viewer.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#158

Post by jxramos »

amai wrote: post #87
mrweasel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German laws might work different, but I'm not really under the impression that software version control is really that compatible with law making. In source code we replace or modify the parts that doesn't work in place. Many laws does not work like that, they are a labyrinth of add ons. A new law is introduced with wordings like "This replaces the words "small businesses" with "nuclear rockets" in the law on "Workpl…

These wordings are basically a manual description of a diff. They wouldn't be necessary if version control would be used for laws. I actually think version control is an absolute necessity for laws.

I can imagine these "relative text patches" could just commit as is written but could be committed with a corresponding metadata and referential locations array backed by some kind of encoding that lands in the same commit. That would unlock a visualization tool that could render a strikeout for the earlier precedent legal text or something like that in whatever way the modification applies.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#159

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

Bewelge wrote: post #119
jandinter wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very cool! I came across your project last year while building https://digebu.de . I wanted to build an "IDE-inspired" law reader. It has selection highlighting and you can open references within the same window. It scrapes gesetze-im-internet.de daily, processes the XML to JSONS and builds static HTML pages, hosted on Github pages. The entire build process for the 6000+ pages takes 5-10 minutes. It uses up less than…

Has git ever made the necessary updates so that you can have proper datestamps on the 80 yr old laws? Last I had checked, nothing prior to unix epoch can be put into git.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#160

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

mrweasel wrote: post #84
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

German laws might work different, but I'm not really under the impression that software version control is really that compatible with law making. In source code we replace or modify the parts that doesn't work in place. Many laws does not work like that, they are a labyrinth of add ons. A new law is introduced with wordings like "This replaces the words "small businesses" with "nuclear rockets" in the law on "Workpl…

>German laws might work different, but I'm not really under the impression that software version control is really that compatible with law making.

Hard disagree. It allows you to attach a name to particular portions of the code (and a date), it shows you when the code moves from one status to another (branches), and you could even easily do things like show who voted/signed for any given piece.

What's not really compatible with law making as it is now, where to repeal a law it doesn't remove the offending code, but adds more code that says "now you can ignore that previous one". Those don't even make it into the official text until codification occurs (this is periodic, not continuous).

>In source code we replace or modify the parts that doesn't work in place. Many laws does not work like that, they are a labyrinth of add ons. A new law is introduced with wordings like "This replaces the words "small businesses" with "nuclear rockets" in the law on "Workplace safety of fishing vessels of 1992", §12, section 3, line 5.

Exactly. They've been doing it wrong (artifact of doing everything on paper, I think).

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