I would love to see more governments operate on a Git-first basis, so that each and every decision/contribution can be tracked online for transparency.
For example in USA we would have budget ceiling crisis, and both parties try to ram through a law to bump up the debt ceiling "to prevent government shutdown". It is being sold as a measure to keep government afloat and running, and is usually ran through pre-holiday like Christmas.
But what actually happens, is thousands and thousands of pages of various pork is rammed through with various cutouts and carveouts for special interest groups due to lobbying.
Public needs to know who when and how is adding these lines and how is bipartisan consensus is being achieved in real-time, not post-factum.
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 remember reading about someone simply adding legal texts to git. This is pretty much useless. I think that people who do this never saw a commercial legal database (or how it is called).
What one usually need, is for example, to have cross-references, i.e. when a law contains phrase like "the certification is issued by a relevant authority", you want to have the "relevant authority" wrapped in a hyperlink pointing to an government order that designates that authority. Also, you typically want to have links to court cases related to some paragraph near it etc. If some change is planned to the law you want to have a note in the text like "this is going to change on September, 1", etc.
Given that many countries have local laws, you might want to be able to filter by a place.
Github might be used for storing raw documents as some weird kind of a database, but it is useless for actually trying to find out the answers to legal questions.
To make an analogy, reading laws on Github is like reading source code without syntax highlighting and navigation.
https://git.tricoteuses.fr/tricoteuses/a_propos has the French constitution and others (e.g. "Code Pénal": https://git.tricoteuses.fr/codes/code_penal/commits/branch/m...) under git too. They have developed a custom tool to automate this: https://git.tricoteuses.fr/logiciels/tricoteuses-legifrance
Let us not confuse git and Github, the later belonging to a reviled US monopoly.
Some of the voting results on https://abstimmung.eu/git/2024 are misleading. Votings are about a decision recommendation (Beschlussempfehlung) which sometimes negates the original request (Antrag), e.g., https://abstimmung.eu/votes/55
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.
I wish there were more beautiful government data aggregators like this one — most people don't even know how much stuff the gov makes publicly accessible (voluntarily or by means of FOIA), probably because it's all buried in 20-year-old Java applets.
What similar resources are out there? Any favorites?
Oof. Did the Bundestag recently get promoted to be a manager?
That should probably be "Github" contribution graph.
> a Git contribution graph
Aka a heatmap.
This is IMHO a very problematic take. This suggests the more votes, the more initiatives, the better. But this is very obviously wrong. Generally most industry nations have "only" a handful of large problems. (Something along climate, pensions, health care, housing and economy)
What happens when these get solved in a Stakkato timeframe shows the current US government which at this point even fails to fulfill basic needs of supermarkets. Proper laws/initiatives aren't created/fleshed out by actual politicians but by a whole army of employees of the related institutions.
Everything else is pure populism.
I first parsed this as [(German parliament) votes as a (Git contribution graph)]. But now I realize that the intended tree is [(German parliament votes) as a (Git contribution graph)]
Was thinking I was going to see a Merkle Tree here :)
Somehow I expected something about merges and branches when reading git contributions graph. The missing keyword is hub
This is great. No maybe everyone wont see it, but making it visual, it hits harder these days. I love this.
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?
Interesting visualisation! On mobile there seems to be an issue with the months where they all display as one word instead of being spaced out: JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
Looks like some version of this is being implemented with the US Congress.
https://xcential.com/blog/version-control-for-law-tracking-c...
Wäre cool, wenn man die Boxen klicken könnte, ohne gegen das Popup der Box eins drunter zu kämpfen.
It would be fascinating to have side by side comparison for all countries and history. It would be full of brilliant and stupid solutions. It should really be convenient enough that law makers cant continue to pretend to be the first one to address a topic.
as Github* contribution graph
Soon we will be able to replace politicians by citizens.
And everybody should be able to submit improvements to the law.
link to the repo, init commit is like 3w old, last commit <1h ago
GitHub is not git.
This is not a Git contribution graph.
If my graph at work looked like this, you could derive from it I would hardly be working.
love it. Will be bookmarking this page
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This is great, but I think blockchain would be even better
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