There are also a repository containing some laws in markdown format on GitHub. They even used PRs for actual changes proposed by the parties in the parliament. Also, the commits have their proper date, so you can `git blame` on the laws and even see which president signed-off that change.
I would love to see more governments operate on a Git-first basis, so that each and every decision/contribution can be tracked online for transparency.
For example in USA we would have budget ceiling crisis, and both parties try to ram through a law to bump up the debt ceiling "to prevent government shutdown". It is being sold as a measure to keep government afloat and running, and is usually ran through pre-holiday like Christmas.
But what actually happens, is thousands and thousands of pages of various pork is rammed through with various cutouts and carveouts for special interest groups due to lobbying.
Public needs to know who when and how is adding these lines and how is bipartisan consensus is being achieved in real-time, not post-factum.
I remember reading about someone simply adding legal texts to git. This is pretty much useless. I think that people who do this never saw a commercial legal database (or how it is called).
What one usually need, is for example, to have cross-references, i.e. when a law contains phrase like "the certification is issued by a relevant authority", you want to have the "relevant authority" wrapped in a hyperlink pointing to an government order that designates that authority. Also, you typically want to have links to court cases related to some paragraph near it etc. If some change is planned to the law you want to have a note in the text like "this is going to change on September, 1", etc.
Given that many countries have local laws, you might want to be able to filter by a place.
Github might be used for storing raw documents as some weird kind of a database, but it is useless for actually trying to find out the answers to legal questions.
To make an analogy, reading laws on Github is like reading source code without syntax highlighting and navigation.
I wish there were more beautiful government data aggregators like this one — most people don't even know how much stuff the gov makes publicly accessible (voluntarily or by means of FOIA), probably because it's all buried in 20-year-old Java applets.
What similar resources are out there? Any favorites?
This is IMHO a very problematic take. This suggests the more votes, the more initiatives, the better. But this is very obviously wrong. Generally most industry nations have "only" a handful of large problems. (Something along climate, pensions, health care, housing and economy)
What happens when these get solved in a Stakkato timeframe shows the current US government which at this point even fails to fulfill basic needs of supermarkets. Proper laws/initiatives aren't created/fleshed out by actual politicians but by a whole army of employees of the related institutions.
I first parsed this as [(German parliament) votes as a (Git contribution graph)]. But now I realize that the intended tree is [(German parliament votes) as a (Git contribution graph)]
Awesome! I was thinking about implementing something similar for the Swedish government APIs to improve transparency and knowledge of the democratic processes.
I wonder how easy it is to adopt this project to that?
Interesting visualisation! On mobile there seems to be an issue with the months where they all display as one word instead of being spaced out: JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
It would be fascinating to have side by side comparison for all countries and history. It would be full of brilliant and stupid solutions. It should really be convenient enough that law makers cant continue to pretend to be the first one to address a topic.
German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
(abstimmung.eu)630 points by mxschll 24 March 2025 | 169 comments
Comments
Sadly, it is unmaintained.
https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze
For example in USA we would have budget ceiling crisis, and both parties try to ram through a law to bump up the debt ceiling "to prevent government shutdown". It is being sold as a measure to keep government afloat and running, and is usually ran through pre-holiday like Christmas.
But what actually happens, is thousands and thousands of pages of various pork is rammed through with various cutouts and carveouts for special interest groups due to lobbying.
Public needs to know who when and how is adding these lines and how is bipartisan consensus is being achieved in real-time, not post-factum.
What one usually need, is for example, to have cross-references, i.e. when a law contains phrase like "the certification is issued by a relevant authority", you want to have the "relevant authority" wrapped in a hyperlink pointing to an government order that designates that authority. Also, you typically want to have links to court cases related to some paragraph near it etc. If some change is planned to the law you want to have a note in the text like "this is going to change on September, 1", etc.
Given that many countries have local laws, you might want to be able to filter by a place.
Github might be used for storing raw documents as some weird kind of a database, but it is useless for actually trying to find out the answers to legal questions.
To make an analogy, reading laws on Github is like reading source code without syntax highlighting and navigation.
What similar resources are out there? Any favorites?
Aka a heatmap.
What happens when these get solved in a Stakkato timeframe shows the current US government which at this point even fails to fulfill basic needs of supermarkets. Proper laws/initiatives aren't created/fleshed out by actual politicians but by a whole army of employees of the related institutions.
Everything else is pure populism.
I wonder how easy it is to adopt this project to that?
https://xcential.com/blog/version-control-for-law-tracking-c...
And everybody should be able to submit improvements to the law.
https://github.com/abstimmung-eu/abstimmung.eu