Can GitHub be used to manage legislation?
Every so often, someone suggests that GitHub would be a great way to manage legislation. Usually, we roll our eyes at the naïve suggestion and that is that.
However, there are a good many similarities that do deserve consideration. What if the amending process was supported by a tool that, while maybe not GitHub, worked on the same principles?
My company, Xcential, built the amending solution for the California Legislature, using a process we like to call Amendments in Context. With this process, a proposed revision of a bill is drafted and then the amendments necessary to produce that revision are extracted as an amendment document. That amendment document, which really becomes an enumeration of proposed changes in a report, is then submitted to the committee for approval. If approved, the revised document that was drafted earlier then becomes the next official version of the bill. This process differs from the traditional process in which an amendment document is drafted, itemizing changes to be made. When the committee approves the amendments, there is a mad rush, usually overnight, to implement (or execute) those amendments to the last version in order to produce the next version. Our Amendments in Context automated approach is more accurate and largely eliminates the overnight bottleneck of having to execute approved amendments before the start of business the following day.
Since implementing this system for California, we’ve been involved in a number of other jurisdictions and efforts that deal with the amending process. This has given us quite a good perspective on the various ways in which bill amendments get handled.
As software developers ourselves, we’ve often been struck by how similar the bill amendment process is to the software development process — the very thing that invariably leads to the suggestion that GitHub could be a great repository for legislation. With this all in mind, let’s compare and contrast the bill amending process with the software development process using GitHub.
(We’ll make suitable procedural simplifications to keep the example clear)
So, as you can see, there are a lot of similarities between amending a bill and implementing a software enhancement. The basic process is essentially identical. However, the differences lie in the details.
Git is designed specifically for the software development process. The legislative process has quite a different set of requirements and traditions which must be met. It simply isn’t possible to bend and distort the legislative process to fit the model prescribed by Git. However, that doesn’t mean that something like GitHub is out of the question. What if there was a GitHub for Legislation — a tool with an associated repository, modeled after Git and GitHub, specifically designed for managing legislation?
This example shows the power of adopting XML for drafting legislation. With properly designed XML, legislation becomes a vast store of machine-readable information that can meet the 21st century challenges of accuracy, efficiency, and transparency. We’re not just printing paper anymore — we’re managing digital information.
Hello from Paris.
Several attempts have been made in France in this direction around the availability in XML and in Open Data of the official legal texts by Legifrance and https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/search/?tag=lois . See these examples, among others :
– https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil/
– https://github.com/Seb35/Archeo-Lex
– especially this first one https://github.com/regardscitoyens/the-law-factory which gives the website : http://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/
I\’d be curious about how this worked within crowd sourced legislation campaigns like Brazil\’s Marco Civil (http://culturadigital.br/marcocivil/ — in portuguese). Given that one of the great things about Git is how it allows for such distributed open-source development, it would be interesting to see it or something like what you designed to be used as a tool for open-source laws (in states like California, perhaps it could be used for drafting and collaborating on ballot initiatives before they start the process to get onto the actual ballot).