GitHub Git Merge 2013, 23 May 2013

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From YouTube: Git Merge • German Law on GitHub (Stefan Wehrmeyer)

Description

Subscribe: http://bit.ly/subgithub • Stefan discusses his work with the Open Knowledge Foundation, the posting of the German Federal Law and Regulations on GitHub, & the benefits of storing legal information within git.

About Git Merge
Git Merge is a Git user conference, held to bring together Git users and Git developers. This May, they came together in Berlin to improve the world of Git for everyone.

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Hi,, I'm stefan, and I'm working for the open knowledge foundation. in germany. We are doing open data.

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And open government projects, and I'm going to talk about laws in git.

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As a current trend of it,, if you've followed, it,.

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And I'm going to show the suggestion in german now., so this is a website called gesetze-im-internet,, which means laws on the internet.. In case you forget where you are,.

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It's on the internet,, so it's right on the name, perfect.

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And what I did is I'm currently in regular intervals,.

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Get all the laws from there, put them in a repository,.

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Convert the xml you get into markdown and you end up.

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With something we call here, bundesgit,, which is a federal git,.

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Basically. bundestag is a german parliament, in case you don't know, and the upper part.

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Is the parliament logo., and here you have also the laws in there.

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It basically looks like that in law,, so this is our copyright law in german and it's nicely rendered.

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As markdown on github,, which is really fantastic,,.

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And so the raw version basically looks like that,.

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So it's nicely structured, more or less.. I mean there are a couple mistakes.

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Because the xml is really really bad to get from the original site. up here,, you notice! That's a [unclear],.

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So what this actually also gives you is that you can render the laws immediately via github,, and now you have basically.

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The same site as the original one, just a bit nicer,.

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And basically, you have all laws here,, which is also quite handy.,.

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But there's, of course, much more to do.

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here's for example,. This is the blame view for law,.

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So you can see basically which commit fucked something up.

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Or made something better., unfortunately, I don't have.

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All the changes to a law., I just started collecting changes.

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Since last summer, and I'm trying to correlate changes.

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To the law to actual commits;, it's very difficult.

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Because there are many, many law changes over the year, and to actually correlate a publication of a law change.

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To something that is actually changed on the website,, it's complicated,.

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But I'm trying to make it work and it definitely has to get better over time.

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This is a history, which is also quite nice., I'm committing everything right now,.

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This is why it's always my face,, but, of course, I'm not taking credit for it, and the best thing is the issues and pull requests,.

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Because laws need approving, and pull requests are perfect for that.

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For example,, this is a pirate party in germany, and they open issues to laws.

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And actually say,, this needs to get better,.

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This is an issue, and then they do some commits to it, and you can see what they think about it and what they actually want to change, and okay,. They want to add a paragraph somewhere.

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perfect., because usually, laws are changed in a way that basically reads,.

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We need to change the third sentence, the first word to "not", or something, right.

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And this is no context and that's how they work.

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At the moment,- and they definitely need some git support.

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We also have a github organization called bundesregierung, which is federal government, because they make the law changes,, and so they fork the laws.

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From the parliament, and then they change something,, then they make a pull request in parliament, and for example,.

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This is the liestungsschutzrecht, which is a very bad law,.

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But here you can see actually how the different versions.

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That came from the ministries and how they change over time.

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For example,, if I click here, I can see the second-to-last version.

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That they did to that law before they gave it to parliament.

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And this is the last one. you can see exactly how it evolved over time. of course, github gets better.

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For non-git users, so lawyers., I was recently told.

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This is a difficult project, because lawyers and git users,.

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The intersection is zero,, there's none., and so I'm actually hoping.

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To get something off the ground,, I don't know if you know prose.io,.

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Which is basically a web interface for git repositories,.

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It can easily edit files., for example, if I click here,.

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Edit,, it will load for a moment and then give me the copyright law.

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Github is getting better at that.; it can now edit stuff on github,.

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But to make it, I want a web interface that is more focused on law changes,, so to make it easier to rep paragraphs in a nice interface, and to display this metadata.

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That is on top in a different way,.

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So if you have any ideas about how laws and git should work, come talk to me and we'll figure something out.

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