PresidentObama on GitHub

Laws are just rules and processes humans have come up with in a best effort to guide society in the right direction, no different than code is just logic programmers come up with to direct servers and clients to interact in a desired way. We've realized the importance of version control in the software realm, it's time to take it's powerful properties and apply it to the political sphere.

I think the founders got an impressive amount of the "free and open nation" concepts right.

I think the Sears and Roebuck Catalog was an effective tool in its time.

I would rather order from an online store than the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. It'll be faster, more responsive, more transparent experience. The store owners intend it and the internet as a medium allows it to a greater extent than was previously possible.

I wouldn't want to run a company without the internet and I think the core and true functions of our government are not run at web speed or with web transparency.

I feel very disconnected from my elected representatives. I suspect this is a shared feeling. It is hard for me to see them "put out work" and hard for me to understand how good a job they do at anything past staying visible.

This is because we still use the best system available to us 150 years ago. What is the best system used today to collaborate? Git. What's the best place to use it? Github.

Look at the crazy stuff we are able to build using that tool. Truly we're living the buzz words and "harnessing the internet".

I'd rather have 100 OSS project leads deciding government policy than our current 100 senators. I value the culture and medium by which they arrive at decisions so much that I'd make that choice "blind", meaning if I didn't know how red or blue they were, I'd still do it. I think the process/medium/culture is strong enough to override any level of partisan feelings.

Were this to occur. Were laws github repos on various topics and proposals were pull requests and amendments were patches we'd have a few core changes.

1. We'd move from fixed terms to respect based terms. Instead of power brokers and entrenched incumbents it'd be about output and the share of a community that continues to be willing to line up behind your vision.

2. Forks. Governments as currently implemented don't allow iterations. Wouldn't it be interesting to declare your county a fork of the "MIT Common Government License" or to yearly declare which license you will abide by. Too hard? Depends on the delivery medium.

3. Education. I increasing hear leaders calling people "folks". I'm a citizen. You're a citizen. I'm obligated to be educated for our democracy to work. When the medium changed we got Khan Academy, CodeSchool and 100s of similar things. I think the impact of this great good is yet to be felt but it gives me hope that these new medium skills can be learned to an extent where they form a basis of participation.

Right now a political party is strong if it can get people out to check the right box or out in the street to yell. Wouldn't it really be something if strength was in number of upvoted feature pushes? Number of accepted patches?

4. Voting. It is hard to vote with your feet. It is easy to vote with a +1. I trust upvotes for my products (amazon), jokes (reddit) and computer news (HN). We can't evaluate new ideas on a technical and work flow basis the same way? Seems like we can and should. Seems like checking one box every 4 years or even every local election seems grossly slow.

Today I'd like to upvote the "stop torturing people" pull request. I feel like this is reasonable and we could get traction on this. I feel like tomorrow morning the draft could be ready and public viewable. The patch could be vetted and merged next week. In public. At the speed of OSS.

Instead, this will be today's news item. Tomorrow it'll fade into the next one. The senators will ultimately decide behind closed doors and the decision will be the wrong one, influenced in the wrong way - not because they're evil or even ill intentioned, but simply because we work in the wrong medium.

The transparency angle is interesting, but I still don't think anything would change. Pull requests would be ignored like petitions, or receive canned responses like letters.

The primary problem here is not technological.

Programmers create software. Lawyers create law.