Ryan Blair, a technologist with the New York State Senate, thinks it could even give citizens a way to fork the law — proposing their own amendments to elected officials. A tool like GitHub could also make it easier for constituents to track and even voice their opinions on changes to complex legal code. “When you really think about it, a bill is a branch of the law,” he says. “I’m just in love with the idea of a constituent being able to send their state senator a pull request.”
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I find this quote fascinating. This would be fantastic if it actually gained traction. It would democratize the process of actually writing a bill. People could actually vote for/against sections for inclusion.
The question is how do we incentivize politicians to start using this. This will not gain any traction if meetings and discussions are held in secret (like ACTA).
Maybe as a start, we can just track what has changed throughout the different revisions of ACTA. Maybe this is something you could do as part of your hackathon.
I'm picking ACTA as it's something that is relatively current and at the forefront of people's minds right now.
Imagine in your mind some special interest groups. Powerful special interest groups. The most powerful special interest groups. Are you imagining, e.g., the permanent civil service, academics, scientists, Medicare and Social Security recipients, and homeowners? Probably not. And yet, there they are. One of the greatest tricks of the most powerful interest groups has been to convince the world that, Keyser Söze–like, they don't even exist. And, unfortunately, you can't give citizens the power to eliminate pork without unleashing these hungry pigs upon the trough.
One github user already put the Utah state legal code on github. All commits are attributed to him, but it's fascinating watching the wording change commit by commit.
Funny we were just discussing law texts analysis with a friend, I even replicated a bit of French Civilian Code revisions on github for further analysis.
I wonder how much will technology close the gap between society and its actual constituents.
They have a small IT department that has developed some pretty interesting tools, most of which are open-source. They had a very progressive CIO who had APIs created to access legislative data, etc.
Really useful stuff if you need to know what the legislature is up to.
It would be amazing to have members of Congress who understood forks and pull requests. Given the recent SOPA/DNS fiasco, I'd say we have another 30 - 50 years.
Gah, why would they use a bar chart for the "Getting Into Github" diagram and then not stick to anything resembling a consistent x-axis - at first it looked like it might be exponential, but it's not even that. The bar sizes are nearly meaningless, because different segments of them are to wildly different scales. All it actually conveys is "this one is more than this one".
Why limit this to technical articles? Why not any written document? The key point, non-tech editors and writers are not going to use the clumsy tools github provides. They might use an editor that hides the mechanics of github.
Yup, they're commenting on the incoming pull requests and looks like they will be accepting some. Curious to see if the original article will be updated with them!
They have things completely backwards. Github didn't make coding more decentralized, Git did. Github made it more centralized, though in a mostly non-binding way thanks to Git.
I wrote a comment under it, and since that day my mailbox was flooded with notifications about other replies for months to come. I think about doing some analytics on them; say, plot the number of comments per day over time - I'd expect to see something like e^(1/x) - 1.
You should do that - though I doubt it'd be an exponential decay. You're going to get a series of bumps every time a post about it pops up on HN (or similar site), and those bumps will probably be positively correlated with one another (note how top posts on HN are oftentimes top posts on related subreddits on Reddit, for example).
Would be interesting to see, though - let me know if you do it.
I think it's almost exactly the wrong impression to give.
Most people associate Facebook with hanging out with friends and general screwing around, and while there are is a certain amount of that, it happens distinctly in the context of doing work (used loosely), which is the main use case.
I guess you could try the angle of “imagine if you were able to do your job on Facebook with all your co-workers, but all the documents would also be visible to anyone else on Facebook so they could, if they chose, become your co-workers too”.
Most people associate Facebook with hanging out with friends and general screwing around, and while there are is a certain amount of that, it happens distinctly in the context of doing work (used loosely), which is the main use case.
Yes, but for geeks, and especially geeks using GitHub, programming work is the equivalent of Facebook "fun".
So now everyone who is NOT a geek and reads that article thinks github is where geeks go to waste time and be unproductive.
Well, considering that 90% on GitHub is crap (Sturgeon's law), they might be right.
While there are of course productive repos in it, also consider all the hobbyist repos, me-too repos, NIH repos, useless fork/pull repos, half-baked repos, circle-jerk fad concept/language of the month repos, etc. Those are quite analogous to Facebook, no?
No. They would analogous to Facebook only if you are a professional web social marketer or something like that. Then Facebook would be to you like github is for programmers.
Still 90% crap, but still somewhat professionally useful crap. For everyone else Facebook is 100% unprofessional. (It may not strictly be a waste of time if you consider genuine keeping in touch with physically remote loved ones.)
"The old regime “makes it very hard to start radical new branches because you generally need to convince the people involved in the status quo up-front about their need to support that radical branch,” Torvalds says. “In contrast, Git makes it easy to just ‘do it’ without asking for permission, and then come back later and show the end result off — telling people ‘look what I did, and I have the numbers to show that my approach is much better.’”"
Substitute "business" for branch and "startup" for git.
Interesting hearing about how they want to tackle the Microsoft ecosystem.
As someone who spent years in that ecosystem and recently left it for OSS, I'll be curious to see what kind of success they see and who they are targeting.
Phil Haack is one of the people who recently joined Github from MS developer tools division, with the aim to make the github experience better for those same devs.
I'm pretty sure the other person is Paul Betts. They are working on Github for Windows (i.e. a Windows version of what they've done with Github for Mac).
Related, I never really got the point of "Github for mac". Do we need a fat-client app when we already have a first-rate web app? What does it do/enable/make easy that github the website doesn't? A Mac or PC isn't a tiny phone screen with no keyboard, where native apps are more usable than websites.
I use TortoiseGit as well for the rest of the github experience, since I'm not a git master and I can pretend it's SVN with pull requests.
I was really quite surprised at the way this article was pitched. I'd expect to read this airy, hand-wavy level of detail in a news magazine, not Wired.
I actually find it entertaining and fun - specially the bits about history, how they found common vision etc. It was an interesting human take to subject that could be inherently jargon-laden and boring
He's literally complaining that apple's firmware does not init the hardware properly. If he's using the legacy BIOS boot, that's a fair assessment of that mode, but it's still not the standard way to boot the computer.
Many open source OS projects have core developers on non-x86/amd64 platforms so as to find errors, x86isms, and other code quality issues reveled by fundamental differences in the underlying architectures.
That's interesting. Pitty I couldn't find a quote in my brief search. I'll try to find that interview later.
The bit that really caught my attention was this: "(...) Torvalds, who briefly moved Linux kernel development to GitHub last September following a security breach at its old home."
I did a double-take at the title and am left wondering whether or not the one-letter difference between this and William Golding's Nobel Prize-winning "Lord of the Flies" is purposeful or not.
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I find this quote fascinating. This would be fantastic if it actually gained traction. It would democratize the process of actually writing a bill. People could actually vote for/against sections for inclusion.