Please note that there is clear distinction between the timeline of the text of an act, its enacting process and its legal content (the legal "meaning").
The text and process timelines (the easiest to create and visualize) are interesting from a journalistic point of view but useless from a legal point of view. You rarely care about the text of an act at a certain point. What you really care about is the state of the law, the sum of all the _effects_ of all _acts_ in a precise moment.
For example it may be interesting to know that on 31st December 2011 an act as been enacted that says that on the 1st of July the new tax code will be amended to read "The taxation level is 10%" instead of the previous "The taxation level is 30%", but what I really want to know is "what is the taxation level today, 25th of May?". Taking only the text into account will not give you the correct answer. What you need is a more complex system that "merges" all the intended actions written in the acts into a (mostly) coherent state of the law.
Versioning the text of the law is not difficult, neither has been difficult since the days of CVS. The hard task is to extract the legal meaning from the text and create time-and-context-bound actions from that.
You're missing the point. The versioning isn't to help me determine the meaning.
The point of the versioning is so that I can see which representative made which change, and from there derive which ones actually have my best interest in mind.
Yeah, but you seem to be poo poo-ing this effort because it won't directly get us from point A to point Z.
If it gets us to point B, C, or D, though, at least more people will understand the difficulties and challenges of getting to Z. Maybe some people will start to ask "Why is this so difficult?" "Does it need to be so difficult?" "What are the forces that make this so difficult and how can we circumvent them or remove them?"
As a software developer, our laws look like the worst form of spaghetti code. They're such a mess that if this were a software product, I would be a strong advocate of doing a complete rewrite. While we're in there doing that rewrite, I want there to be an update to our change control management.
> many parliaments vote on single articles (or single modification proposals) and the complete act is never voted.
Sounds like a flaw in change control management. That would be like a software developer who checked in code without being responsible for having the automated tests succeed. Any such process that didn't hold the software developer who checked in the code accountable for fixing how it breaks the rest of the application is fundamentally flawed.
Rather than being apologists for the current system(s) of law making and governing, why don't we think big and figure out a way to really re-invent them?
Step one is shining more light on the current system by getting more people in lots of disciplines looking at it. Software design is fundamentally based upon the careful application of specific sets of rules. We've made huge steps in solving problems that lawmakers just accept as the "way things are". We can do better.
> Yeah, but you seem to be poo poo-ing this effort because it won't directly get us from point A to point Z.
No way. I am all excited about this kind of things and I have already stated that anybody who wants to work on this topic is more than welcome to mail me to discuss things together.
I am just telling you that these efforts, although necessary and interesting, are not novel ("new" yes, "novel" no) neither a solution to the real current problem. But let's all work together to overcome this.
> Rather than being apologists for the current system(s) of law making and governing, why don't we think big and figure out a way to really re-invent them?
We need to be both: realists and optimists. The reality is that any future system will have to deal with the current system without regarding them as "legacy systems": in UK there are still valid acts and cases from the late medieval times. Another harsh reality is that you can only change a legislative system from the inside. You can pressure it from the outside but, in the end, only people making the law can change how the law is made.
The optimism comes from the fact that there has been a huge movement in the legal offices all around the world in the last 15 years towards better legislative drafting rules (what we would call "coding standards"). If you want an example of a new guideline made in collaboration with computer scientists, have a look at http://www.apkn.org/lrp/guidelines/guidelines (there are being adopted by the youngest democracies in Africa, but also in some EU countries).
These guidelines contains things like "you should always state which acts you repel, never use 'all the acts contrary to this are repelled'". Do you see how much more _machineable_ is the former versus the latter?
Many legislative offices are pushing pressure towards MP in order to make these the use of such guidelines mandatory. It would be a huge step forward. Another way to do this is via a "the code is the law" approach: there is a tool made by the EU parliament that the MP can use to propose changes to debated bills. Such tool has all these guidelines hardcoded and there is no way to get around them (you can submit a written request but takes much longer to be debated). This tool is really increasing the quality of generated acts.
yes, you're right in that versioning is not technically difficult, but getting the establishment to consider doing it (let alone actually doing it) is a major milestone.
here's an example of an act that's been modified: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo3/41/79?timeline=true
and an example of a bill going through parliament: http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/financeno4/docum...