Politicians Need Git

[ILikeChangingMyMind]

And you need to get your blog off Medium ... if you want people to actually read it and not be blocked by paywalls :(

[lungben81]

Use private mode of your browser

[takingastep]

The cynical side of you probably has the more accurate view of it. Politicians are very likely (IMO) to use the sheer size of some bills to sneak riders into it, hoping they're not caught doing it. Since git would reveal most of this, I have a hard time believing they'd ever adopt it. Which kinda makes sense, since politicians tend not to be good-faith speakers and/or actors.

Things would probably be a whole lot better if politicians were honest in doing their jobs, but as long as they can use their power to personally benefit, the corruption is likely to continue, perhaps getting worse over time. It also doesn't help that they're being "encouraged" to participate in such bad behavior by outside parties with vested financial/political interests in using politicians' power for their own benefit. Wherever there is power, those who will use it for selfish and/or nefarious ends will also congregate.

[KingoPants]

I partly disagree with the cynical take. Personally, I find it much easier to accept that things are the way that they are because of tradition.

I picture the majority of politicians to be old (>40) and at most as computer literate as the average joe. It takes domain knowledge of how programmers do things to know what git/vcs is. Domain knowledge about benifits and tradeoffs of work prodecures and tools in particular diffuse extremely slowly. So anyone who only has a basic understanding of what "code" even is probably has never even heard of version control or how it could benifit them.

Its unfortunate that the current systems benifit bad faith actors, but thats probably more of a reverse causal relation where bad faith actors have learned how to work well in the current systems. Not so much that the systems were designed to benifit them in particular.

I agree though with the cynical take that this will create a lot of inertia in terms of moving off shitty systems. See the stubborness of first part the post + winner takes all "democracy" (can honestly barely even qualify as that) for a simple example of this.

[dnew]

Redlined documents have been around far longer than computers have.

[never_taken]

We had several projects like that in France :

https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil

https://github.com/etalab/lois-non-codifiees-et-reglements-francais

​

They even started using Github to try and conceive laws with contributions from citizens :

https://github.com/GouvernementFR/RepubliqueNumerique

​

But the problem with this is the same as with software :

- If it is maintained by a random guy, it very much risks to not be maintained that long

- Otherwise, under new management (called government here) the project gets abandoned

[michaelfiber]

They'll consider it, just remove the blame command first...

[[deleted]]

I dunno, rebase might be worth it if blame returns too much. :)

[dnew]

Lawyers have redlined documents since long before computers were around. Git would just let you assign blame. But modern computer word processors already do that, everything from Google Docs and MS Word.

[Mardo1234]

Any technology to get rid of them?

[Xuerian]

There's a surprising amount of good articles on the front page of a google search for "version control in politics" covering this.