Laws should be written more like code is written. It should not be written by passing Word documents around but there should be software like Git that makes it clear who made what amendments and that makes changes to laws transparent.
Having good software here will be a quality of life improvement for lawmakers the same way Git is a quality of life improvement for programmers. It will also help all other parties that want to follow the legislative process.
I would expect that it improves the quality of the average law because it’s clear to more of the people working on the law what the law actually will do.
Could this be done by a third party? If the text of the law is public, and the voting on changes is also public information, a third party could maintain this record.
You get some gain from third parties but it would still like writing code and at the end of the week all programmers send their word documents full of code to their manager and then the manager puts them into the repo.
Politicians frequently vote on laws where they don’t really know the full effects of the law because they don’t fully read it and a word document saying “we will strike paragraph XY and replace it with ZY in law A” doesn’t make it clear what the law change does.
Further down the road, if you would have such a system you could make a law that requires lobbyists to send their suggested law changes directly to the politician in a file that’s like a pull request.
Laws should be written more like code is written. It should not be written by passing Word documents around but there should be software like Git that makes it clear who made what amendments and that makes changes to laws transparent.
Having good software here will be a quality of life improvement for lawmakers the same way Git is a quality of life improvement for programmers. It will also help all other parties that want to follow the legislative process.
I would expect that it improves the quality of the average law because it’s clear to more of the people working on the law what the law actually will do.
Could this be done by a third party? If the text of the law is public, and the voting on changes is also public information, a third party could maintain this record.
You get some gain from third parties but it would still like writing code and at the end of the week all programmers send their word documents full of code to their manager and then the manager puts them into the repo.
Politicians frequently vote on laws where they don’t really know the full effects of the law because they don’t fully read it and a word document saying “we will strike paragraph XY and replace it with ZY in law A” doesn’t make it clear what the law change does.
Further down the road, if you would have such a system you could make a law that requires lobbyists to send their suggested law changes directly to the politician in a file that’s like a pull request.
I suspect the controversial part of this would be finding an actual implementation which everyone agrees on and the funding to make it happen.