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I applaud what you're trying to do, but it may be a tad idealistic. The US is filled with legacy code, and there are lots of vested interests in keeping it the complicated way. As programmers we are trained to be purely logical, but politics and governance is 99% emotion, 1% logic.



The first step in changing something is being able to understand it, and the first step in understanding it is to have it organized. The organizational component that is missing is, to put it in terms we at HN deal with everyday, to generate Changelogs and revision history (with attribution, down to the politician).

It would be nice to have all changes, including proposed changes, documented in a relatively easy to navigate format. Git, or any modern SCM, may qualify as a tool to provide that. Some of the most important metadata about proposed changes, even if they don't get included in the final, passed laws, would exist on branches; metadata like who proposed it and who signed off on it, who supports it. If anything, this would make The Daily Show's researchers' job easier.

While politics is 99% emotion, those emotions should include motivation, not frustration experienced early on when trying to grok the system. In a free society, the output of the governance should be accessible to all. One can debate if git is accessible, but it would definitely be a format that is more accessible, and maybe even more machine processable, than the current system.


Perhaps MediaWiki (or similar) would be a better choice. The (incomplete) U.S. Code is up on WikiSource (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Code).


I actually prefer source code revision system more than wiki. Wikis are chaos. People can still fork your code, and submit pull requests. Moderation is still required.


Maybe you're right. This would be like trying to carve out an optimal Lisp with CL as one's starting point. A better approach might be to begin with the Constitution (as pg did with McCarthy's original paper) and "restart the kind of [legal] design" the founders were "doing at the point where [they] left off." (http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html)


Politics and governance maybe, but not law. The text of law actually shows remarkable statistical resemblance to code, since fundamentally it does something similar and has to be just as explicit in its methods. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/code-looks-like.ht...




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