zlacker

I volunteer at the Public Knowledge Foundation (an Israeli version of The Sunlight Foundation), we develop and maintain oknesset.org (like opencongress.org). For the past couple months we've been researching the possibility of representing Israeli law as a git repository, so that oknesset.org can visualize the diff to a law a bill proposal represents, and track it as a branch until it is merged into law. Since Israel is a relatively young and small country the number of laws and changes is orders of magnitude smaller than most western/democratic countries which publicize the legislative process. Israel's legislative branch is unicameral so the process itself is relatively straightforward; supposedly we'd be a good test case. We already have quite a lot of insight but in general it seems that git (and generally, any VCS) has significant impedance mismatch with the legislative process, specifically regarding the ability to compile/link all the different laws into one comprehensive database representing the law. One prominent example is the existence of multiple timelines of ratification. There are at least three dates relevant to the ratification of bills:

1. Date of third (and final) vote = the date the parliament has voted a bill as law

2. Date of publication (for technical reasons this might not coincide with the vote date)

3. Date of validity - a bill is usually passed with a date of validity, between the date of publication and validity the bill is not formally law yet. Sometimes there are separate dates of validity for separate parts of the bill. To make matters more complicated, dates of validity can be changed when the bill designates government ministers with the authority to change them (the dates).

Also, in Israel many laws never "make it" to their date of validity since the yearly Law of Arrangements (http://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/eng/hesderim_eng.htm) decides which laws passed in the previous year have proper funding, such that officially some laws get "punted" into the future, possibly indefinitely. It gets quite confusing because from a legal point of view, the dates that are relevant to the justice system (as in, when a bill is relevant or not to the court) are usually the date of voting, whereas when it comes to government the third date is the important one.

We are still moving forward with our initiative, but it seems that for now there are no version control systems which are a good solution to the law management problem.

(edited for formatting)