This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Since the election of President Donald Trump, the part of the internet that caters to liberals has been abound with explanations of fascism and how you get there. We're not there yet -- not close, by my estimation -- but something new to me is that fascism requires ambiguity in the law. Well, not the law. The law is clear in dictatorships: what the dictator says, goes. What is required to be ambiguous is the rules for everyone else. This can take many forms -- keeping the laws secret, making access to legal counsel difficult or impossible, changing the laws to delegitimize previously acceptable behavior. In that sense, access to the law is a core value of open, democratic government. For us to say that we're free people with a government chosen by us, we must all have access to competent legal representation and the laws must be open and transparent.
So my eye was recently caught by an incredibly forward-thinking initiative from the government of the City of Washington, D.C. The city has moved the management of its municipal code to GitHub, a tool commonly used in software development. Once the comparison was made for me, it was clear that the law and coding have more in common than I'd thought. An important part of the lawmaking process is the drafting of new laws, but also the maintenance of old laws, such as making changes to account for new technology, changes in the culture, or simply fixing typos. Laws are intricate and intertwined pieces of language which function through systematic interpretation. And the absence of even a comma can drastically change how the law is interpreted (fellow West Wing fans will also remember the issue of the Takings Clause).
The beauty of GitHub is that, unlike the website which provides the Longmont Municipal Code without annotation, Washington, D.C.'s code now has a memory. There is a clear log of every single change that will ever be made, and why that change was made. Text with impenetrable lists of nested commas will be more clear because, if you're really interested, you can go back and see how that paragraph was drafted. You can find out exactly which law created a part of the code which you find objectionable (and who voted for it). These are features which will be familiar to anyone who has written software with a team, but now they're available for the law.
Making the law accessible in this way also has benefits for the health of democracy, arcane though they may seem. GitHub is open to the public, and open access. Everyone has access to the entirety of Washington, D.C.'s municipal code. This seems like a small thing, but it wasn't long ago that someone got sued for publishing the annotated Georgia legal code -- a document created by Georgia lawmakers and state employees, and should, therefore, be freely accessible to all of its citizens. Further, because the GitHub repository is the authoritative code, the D.C. website always reflects the law as it is now rather than the law from the last time someone updated the website.
As Longmont grows from the large town that it is now, these kinds of changes to ensure transparency and access should be implemented. It should be viewed as a natural transition based on technological advances -- just as our laws are no longer written on parchment with feather quills, they should no longer remain the domain a few highly trained experts. No one should have to visit the clerk's office to see the authoritative rules that govern a community, or pay for an official copy, and everyone should be easily able to see how exactly they came to be.
