Washington DC Made GitHub Its Official Digital Source For Laws (arstechnica.com)

"Recently, I found a typo in the District of Columbia's legal code and corrected it using GitHub," writes D.C. based "civic hacker" Joshua Tauberer, adding "My feat highlights the groundbreaking way the District manages its legal code." The District does something with its legal code that no other jurisdiction in the world does (to my knowledge): it publishes the law on GitHub.... This isn't a copy of the DC law. It is an authoritative source. It is where the DC Council stores the digital versions of enacted laws, and this source feeds directly into the Council's DC Code website.... This is a milestone in the advancement of open government and open legal publishing.

No one should expect that editing the law on GitHub is going to become the new normal, however. My edit wasn't substantive. This sort of "technical correction," as lawyers would call it, didn't need to be passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor. I also happen to have expertise in this particular law, GitHub, XML, and the Council's new publishing process created by the Open Law Library.... GitHub's pull-request feature isn't going to replace public hearings, expert testimony, negotiations between stakeholders, votes by elected representatives, etc. -- and it shouldn't. Yet Open Law Library's new legal publishing process is groundbreaking. The Open Law Library is changing how we change the law...

Open Law Library's mission as a nonprofit is to make all laws as open and accessible as possible. The library's strategy is to achieve openness by making openness pay off for governments: it uses open, machine-readable laws to build software tools that make codification faster and more accurate. The cool thing about this is that governments can benefit from using Open Law Library's software even if open data isn't their highest priority, but in the background they'll still be publishing their laws in an open and accessible format -- everybody wins. Today, instead of authoring the DC Code in Word documents stored on a hard drive in a locked room in a basement, the Code is now stored in XML format in a place everyone can see -- on the Web."
The article notes that 18 more states have now enacted "Uniform Electronic Legal Material Acts" -- and that several other jurisdictions are already publishing their legal codes with official bulk XML downloads. "The US federal government began publishing XML downloads for the Code of Federal Regulations in 2009 and the United States Code in 2013."

But the District of Columbia "appears to be the first jurisdiction to combine the two by putting its legal code on GitHub and accepting a change from a member of the public."

Comments

Close, but drafts would be even better.

[hey!]

Every time somebody inserts something into a law, it should be committed with a digital certificate so we know exactly who is giving out the candy to whom.

Re:Close, but drafts would be even better.

[hey!]

It's no different from the way most non-trivial software projects are managed. A source control system automatically keeps track of every change made and who made them; you can get a complete audit trail of changes and recreate any old versions at will. In practice the process is very simple, all the complicated clerical tracking is done by the software.

Personally I think many other kinds of work would benefit from using source control software. I have writer friends who complain about keeping track of old versions of manuscripts, and I keep telling them they should use a source control system. That way they could recall old versions that they decided might be better, keep notes on why they made certain changes, try out alternative endings, and keep all that mess organized, even merging different versions of a manuscript. The thing is, what a source control system does sounds so *magical* to them they just assume it's got to be incredibly complicated to use. It's not. All the complicated stuff is done under the covers for you.

Now if you're setting up a system that's going to authenticate changes submitted by some person (as in the idea that we'll know who slipped something into a bill as a favor), that takes a bit more administrative expertise than running a local git repository. But it's not rocket science by any means.

Re:Close, but drafts would be even better.

[Kokuyo]

I'll out myself here but I have a really hard time getting the hang of git...

So yeah, it's nice that it's easy for you but their apprehension is not completely unfounded.

I've never used github. Is it a decent VCS?

[Snotnose]

VCS = Version Control System. In other words, can it track a document as it s revised, and KEEP TRACK OF WHO REVISED IT. I've wanted this in government for a good 30 years, about the time VCS's showed up. I'm so sick of hearing on the news "the added amendment..." while having no way to find out who added the amendment.

Not the law, just their formatting tags and footno

[raymorris]

Neither statutes nor court opinions are copyright Lexis Nexus or Westlaw.

What these companies have copyright on are:

Their formatting tags they add (copy-pasted text from them as plain text, unformatted, to avoid any problems).

The text of their notes about relevant cases, which they have selected and summarized.

So if Westlaw says this:
Subsection C was limited based on fair use considerations in Jones vs Smith (2012) regarding digital libraries.

You can NOT directly copy-paste that. You CAN write this:
See Jones vs Smith (2012)

Or this:
For fair use exceptions, see Jones v Smith

Or even put the entire text of the Jones v Smith ruling.
You just can't copy-pasted the exact words that LN or Westlaw wrote.

Re:I've never used github. Is it a decent VCS?

[Yosho]

GitHub is basically a web-based frontend for git, which is the de facto king of VCSes. Almost every open source project actively under development today uses it, and it's also commonly used by many closed-source software developers (including, for example, Microsoft, who also owns GitHub).

Re:I've never used github. Is it a decent VCS?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Yeah, it was unfortunate, but understandable, that the Founding Fathers initially went with CVS - despite John Quincy Adams’ strong advocacy for SVN.

Regardless, it’s good to see that the city of DC, at least, has upgraded to git.

I really like this

[oldgraybeard]

All regulations and laws at all levels of government should be public domain. ATM they are not!

Just my 2 cents ;)

Re:Unfortunately not particularly useful.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

It feels like it should be unconstitutional

An open records group (Public.Resources.Org) bought a copy of the annotated code of Georgia and published it online (think SciHub, but for law.) They got sued by the group that claimed to own the copyright. They took it to court, and, last month, won their court case The Supreme Court may overrule the Appeals Court, but it's now at that level (and doesn't seem likely).

From my understanding, the case hinges on the fact that the judges and lawmakers are actually doing work for hire on behalf of the people, who would be the ones to own the copyright. Quotes in the articles are more elegantly phrased.

Re:I've never used github. Is it a decent VCS?

[grep -v '.*' *]

itâ(TM)s good to see that the city of DC, at least, has upgraded to git.

I wish DC would tell *all* of the legislators there to GIT and stay git.

Re:Law on uncontrolled server?

[djinn6]

Git (and really any DVCS) already handles this problem. Since a complete copy is always stored locally, any attempt to rewrite Git history will cause people to see unexpected merges or errors when updating their local repo. Not to mention if any of them issue a "git diff master origin/master", they would immediately see the changes. For the very paranoid, they can also add another remote repo that belongs to someone they trust, and compare it with the one on GitHub.

Creating a Git repo is probably one of the most robust way to ensure it cannot be tampered with. Even the alternative of storing it on paper is not as good because a surreptitiously modified copy could not be easily compared to other copies. So the changes could be undiscovered a long period of time. With Git, there would be thousands of lawyers, judges and special interest groups, each with their own copy of the law to which any changes would be easily noticeable. The fact that the copy GitHub hosts is canonical does not compromise its integrity at all.