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Comment by newman314 | Hacker News Reader

Ryan Blair, a technologist with the New York State Senate, thinks it could even give citizens a way to fork the law — proposing their own amendments to elected officials. A tool like GitHub could also make it easier for constituents to track and even voice their opinions on changes to complex legal code. “When you really think about it, a bill is a branch of the law,” he says. “I’m just in love with the idea of a constituent being able to send their state senator a pull request.”

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I find this quote fascinating. This would be fantastic if it actually gained traction. It would democratize the process of actually writing a bill. People could actually vote for/against sections for inclusion.

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Source-controlled legislation would also provide a cryptographically-secure audit trail to track shady, late-night amendments.

Docracy (basically GitHub for legal documents) is going to do exactly that at the next legal hackathon http://legalhackathon.blipclinic.org/

The question is how do we incentivize politicians to start using this. This will not gain any traction if meetings and discussions are held in secret (like ACTA).

Maybe as a start, we can just track what has changed throughout the different revisions of ACTA. Maybe this is something you could do as part of your hackathon.

I'm picking ACTA as it's something that is relatively current and at the forefront of people's minds right now.

One way is to push it through something like Code For America who could then bring it to interested city governments.

http://codeforamerica.org/

It would democratize the process of actually writing a bill. People could actually vote for/against sections for inclusion.

This might be true. Why does everyone seem to assume that it would be a good thing?

It may not be a good thing, but it offers advantages currently unavailable in our current system--a way for citizens to shoot down piggybacked laws.

The flip side is that large, money backed entities could also use FUD to manipulate citizens into shooting down clauses in bills.

Heed the flip side.

Imagine in your mind some special interest groups. Powerful special interest groups. The most powerful special interest groups. Are you imagining, e.g., the permanent civil service, academics, scientists, Medicare and Social Security recipients, and homeowners? Probably not. And yet, there they are. One of the greatest tricks of the most powerful interest groups has been to convince the world that, Keyser Söze–like, they don't even exist. And, unfortunately, you can't give citizens the power to eliminate pork without unleashing these hungry pigs upon the trough.

One github user already put the Utah state legal code on github. All commits are attributed to him, but it's fascinating watching the wording change commit by commit.

His README proposes a similar law patching idea.

https://github.com/divegeek/utahcode

Funny we were just discussing law texts analysis with a friend, I even replicated a bit of French Civilian Code revisions on github for further analysis.

I wonder how much will technology close the gap between society and its actual constituents.

What I find fascinating is "a technologist with the New York State Senate" - what does this guy do? Advise state senators on tech matters?

They have a small IT department that has developed some pretty interesting tools, most of which are open-source. They had a very progressive CIO who had APIs created to access legislative data, etc.

Really useful stuff if you need to know what the legislature is up to.

http://www.nysenate.gov/open

It would be amazing to have members of Congress who understood forks and pull requests. Given the recent SOPA/DNS fiasco, I'd say we have another 30 - 50 years.

There's a Quora answer about couching the lawmaking process in software development terms. You might find it interesting:

http://www.quora.com/What-can-lawmakers-learn-from-computer-...

I've got to say, I thought that quote was pretty awesome myself. A great concept! The public's input on a law -- who would have thought, huh?

Now if they could implement it successfully.

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