SoylentNews

MrPlow writes in with a submission via IRC for SoyCow1984:

How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request:

Recently, I found a typo in the District of Columbia’s legal code and corrected it using GitHub. My feat highlights the groundbreaking way the District manages its legal code.

As a member of the DC Mayor’s Open Government Advisory Group, I was researching the law that establishes DC’s office of open government, which issues regulations and advisory opinions for the District’s open meetings law (OMA) and open records law (FOIA). The law was updated last month, and something seemed to have changed: there was no longer a reference to issuing advisory opinions for FOIA. Comparing the DC Code to the act that made the change, I noticed that something was amiss in section (d):

(d) The Office of Open Government may issue advisory opinions on the implementation of subchapter I of Chapter 5 of Title 2.

It had a typo.

Subchapter I of Chapter 5 of Title 2 of the DC Code is about how the DC government makes regulations. FOIA is subchapter II, not subchapter I. In other words, the link to “subchapter I of Chapter 5 of Title 2” took visitors to the wrong part of the law.

[...] Last week, I opened the file on GitHub that had the typo, edited the file, and submitted my edit using GitHub’s “pull request” feature. A pull request is a request to the file’s maintainer to review a change and then, if approved, pull it in to the main file:

[...] A few days later, the Council’s codification lawyer merged my pull request:

... and the DC Code website was automatically updated, showing what you’ll see on the page today:

[...] My edit wasn’t substantive. This sort of “technical correction,” as lawyers would call it, didn’t need to be passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor. I also happen to have expertise in this particular law, GitHub, XML, and the Council’s new publishing process created by the Open Law Library. So I knew what change to submit, and DC’s codification counsel was able to merge it with the click of a button. That’s not how lawmaking works, and GitHub’s pull-request feature isn’t going to replace public hearings, expert testimony, negotiations between stakeholders, votes by elected representatives, etc. — and it shouldn’t.

Yet Open Law Library’s new legal publishing process is groundbreaking.

[...] Open Law Library’s mission as a nonprofit is to make all laws as open and accessible as possible. The library’s strategy is to achieve openness by making openness pay off for governments: it uses open, machine-readable laws to build software tools that make codification faster and more accurate. The cool thing about this is that governments can benefit from using Open Law Library’s software even if open data isn’t their highest priority, but in the background they’ll still be publishing their laws in an open and accessible format—everybody wins.

Today, instead of authoring the DC Code in Word documents stored on a hard drive in a locked room in a basement, the Code is now stored in XML format in a place everyone can see—on the Web.

[...] I hope other jurisdictions learn from the District and move the law forward with the Open Law Library, and I especially hope that the District expands its use of Open Law Library tools to other aspects of DC law starting with the DC Municipal Regulations (DCMR).

Original Submission