Saturday, July 14, 2007

Why the USA Needs a Congressional Version Control System

O'REILLY Radar - Why Congress Needs a Version Control System

"...

These are really thought-provoking suggestions. I was particularly struck by Karl's suggestion of a version control system for Congress. They say you don't want to see either laws or sausages being made, but I think they are wrong. Imagine how much more transparency and accountability our government would have if it were possible to see what changes were made by whom, who inserted extraneous riders into various bills, and generally to track the influence of various interests by the new visibility into their actual control over the knobs and levers of government!

..."

Now that's an interesting thought... Using Web 2.0 to build Government 2.0.

(via ArtLung BlogDaily Links)

1 comment:

Joe Crawford said...

Wasn't that an interesting thought?

In development we look at CVS or SVN checkins to get a sense of why we made what decisions when. It gives an accounting of who "broke the build" or which programmer added a key feature.

In the open source world, where anyone can commit, such accountability can help track down and eliminate code added with bad intents.