
Put change.gov Under Revision Control - pg
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/change-gov-revision-control.html
======
markessien
If you do this, then every single change in a word or a phrase will have some
article about it. Some people will compulsively track every small change - and
what this means is that the government will have to be extra careful before
changing even a word. This will lead to bureaucracy, and even more secrecy,
because working documents would never get published, only final documents.

Putting change.gov under source control is not a good idea. You want Obama
personally having to field questions all the time, because some secretary
chose a particular order of words?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Some of the changes are extremely important. For instance, Obama originally
had this to say about forced labor:

 _Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a
plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school
and 100 hours of community service in college every year._

Now all he says is this:

 _They'll [Obama and Biden] set a goal that all middle school and high school
students engage in 50 hours of community service a year, and develop a plan
for all college students who engage in 100 hours of community service to
receive a fully-refundable tax credit of $4,000 for their education._

(Both from <http://change.gov/americaserves>)

There are major, substantial changes being made here. There is also
obfuscation going on, as you see above. Knowledge of what he previously wrote
clarifies what "set a goal" means. I think it's important for the American
people to see this.

~~~
GHFigs
I would think the _latter_ serves more to clarify the former than the other
way around. Generally that's the way it works. Surely, in a lifetime of
communication you have at one point or another misspoken or been misunderstood
and had to clarify your meaning. Would it be fair for listeners to disregard
your later statements entirely simply because they came later?

Your casting a volunteer program as "forced labor" strongly indicates that you
have a political opinion on what the interpretation _ought_ to be. It would be
_convenient_ for you if that interpretation would be correct, but it would not
be _accurate_.

Not only is the latter in line with the plan (to require service in exchange
for the tax credit) outlined well before the election, but it also has the
advantage of actually making sense in context. Why would a page describing
expansion of established volunteer services suddenly shift to mean mandatory
service? And for students only? And then go right back to talking about
voluntary services? It would make little sense to have the meaning of an
entire page hinge on a single word in a middle paragraph, and even if it were
an accurate representation of intent, the sentence itself is utterly bungled.
Calling it obfuscation is senseless, too, given how freely the site expresses
other plans that many find disagreeable.

You want people to believe that the President-Elect is only willing to express
major, substantial changes in policy via one word on one page of one site at
one time, now past? Please.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The latter version only tells you the goal. The former version told you the
mechanism by which Obama will achieve this goal, namely force. That's
information which has been removed. The new information in the latter version
is that college students will be paid for their work.

We will find out soon enough whether Obama really does support forced labor. I
don't think it's an outlandish idea, however. Forced labor has quite a few
supporters on the left (Rangel, Clark and McDermott, for instance
<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:H.R.393>:).

Anyway, this isn't really the place to discuss the merits of Obama's possible
policy proposals. My point is this: at one time, change.gov advocated forced
labor. The American people deserve to be able to easily look this up for
themselves, and see what other changes were made.

~~~
GHFigs
There are some who don't think it's outlandish that Obama might be a lizard
person in disguise, and that where change.gov states that the new
administration "will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving
programs available for individuals over age 55", that it is really advocating
euthanasia and reprocessing into Soylent Green as a solution to both
overpopulation and world hunger. Try as I might to propose alternative
interpretations more in line with Obama's prior statements, they only see what
they want to see.

Whether you think it's an outlandish idea or not does not have any impact on
whether it is actually true or whether the case you've made is actually
reasonable. You're still insinuating that Obama advocates forced labor based
on a redacted description of a program (the American Opportunity Tax Credit,
by name) which was never before or ever since been described as mandatory,
forced, or required. Implying that it bears resemblance to H.R.393 is an
enormous stretch beyond the facts, as well, and the attempt at guilt-by-
association is transparent. Rangel, Clark and McDermott are not Obama,
representatives of Obama, or the authors of change.gov. Nor for that matter
are any supporters of draft reinstatement who happen to not be Democrats.

You say "this isn't really the place to discuss the merits of Obama's possible
policy proposals", and yet that's exactly what you are doing and I am not. As
I noted before, your political bias is obvious. You are clearly more concerned
with associating Obama with the concept of forced labor than either
ascertaining the correct interpretation of his stated plans or in encouraging
others to draw their own conclusions based on the supposed "evidence". Though
you feign doubt saying "We will find out soon enough whether Obama really does
support forced labor.", that is little different from saying "We will find out
soon enough whether Obama really has stopped beating his wife." You don't
appear to be concerned with the answer so much calling it into question. In
other fields this is known as "FUD".

It does little good to advocate transparency for the sake of the American
people when you do so by attempting to obscure matters even further.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I was originally responding to this: _Some people will compulsively track
every small change - and what this means is that the government will have to
be extra careful before changing even a word._

My point: there are important changes being made which deserve to be tracked.
I provided an example of such a change. I also explained in another post
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380300>) why I picked this example: by
some ad-hoc means, I was able to dig up the original language.

Also, your analogy is ridiculous. If early versions advocated euthanasia, and
then it was changed to say "setting a goal to reduce the burden of old people
on the social security system", I would be concerned.

Unlike your euthanasia example, early versions of the website did
unambiguously advocate forced labor. Here is a pdf copy:

[http://mensnewsdaily.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/11/America_...](http://mensnewsdaily.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/11/America_Serves_Change.pdf)

By the way, your one man downmod squad is cute. Too bad this isn't reddit;
plenty of people here like Obama (I used to myself), but we have few (if any)
fanatical pro-Obama downmodders.

~~~
kalvin
No need to be a fanatical Obama downmodder to see your use of the term "forced
labor" as trolling. If you're unfamiliar with how the term is used-- though I
don't think you are-- take a look at the first page of Google results for an
idea.

Mandatory community service may be a terrible idea, but it's "forced labor" in
the same way mandatory K-12 education is.

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's forced labor in the sense that Obama advocated forcing people to perform
labor. The gulag was vastly worse. So what?

~~~
Angostura
So what? The use of the term makes it appear that you are equating getting a
kid to do homework with the Gulag's arrests, interrogations, transport in
unheated cattle cars, forced labor, destruction of families, years spent in
exile, and the early and unnecessary deaths.

------
tlrobinson
Well, government documents aren't eligible for copyright, so anyone could hack
together a crawler and republish the entire history of change.gov (or any
other .gov, for that matter). Right?

In fact, this would be even better, since there would be no way for the
government to retroactively tamper with the record.

<tinfoilhat>well, except by cracking my servers via those NSA backdoors in
AES</tinfoilhat>

------
brandnewlow
<http://versionista.com/> ?

------
jonknee
Version control for bills would be quite interesting.

~~~
patio11
That is actually done.

<http://thomas.loc.gov/>

Not quite as easy to use as SVN with Trac integration, I admit, but it is
pretty good for government work.

------
gruseom
The Internet Archive is almost certainly capturing all these changes for
posterity. That admittedly doesn't really address O'Reilly's main goal, to
legitimate version tracking as a device for political transparency.

But there's another problem, too. The Internet Archive has a 6-month lag
between collecting and publishing. That cripples it for oversight purposes,
which is a pity. I only found this out because
<http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://change.gov> doesn't have anything yet.
Maybe they could be persuaded to fast-track pages with a .gov suffix or
something.

------
JulianMorrison
What would be really interesting about having policy documents up on github or
something, would be not just the changes, but the change notes. "Took this bit
out, can't afford it, diverting funds to health instead", etc.

------
ars
Not everything has to be automated - why not do manual version control?

