Washington DC keeps its legal code on GitHub, and a citizen's pull request fixed a typo

The DC Council passes acts that amend the DC Code, and lawyers fold each change into the Code, a process called codification. It used to be manual work in Word documents. A nonprofit contractor, the Open Law Library, now automates it by storing the Code as XML on GitHub.

In an Ars Technica first-person account, Joshua Tauberer, who helped digitize DC's code in 2013-2014, describes spotting a bad cross-reference in the open-government statute: a citation to subchapter I instead of II. He changed the roman numeral in the XML and opened a pull request. A few days later the Council's codification counsel merged it, and the Code website updated by itself.

The repository is the authoritative source, not a copy. The Open Law Library's strategy is to make openness pay off for governments by building software that makes codification faster, so openness arrives as a side effect.

Store the law as XML in a version-controlled repository, so every amendment is a tracked change and the website builds from it.

Lawmaking and software engineering both track changes to a body of text.

Tooling that speeds codification gives a government a reason to adopt open formats.

The XML file is rendered into the website, turning a tagged citation into a link.

Public GitHub access lets outsiders propose fixes while the Council keeps merge control.

Put a document that changes in small tracked edits under software version control, and sell openness as faster, more accurate work.

Tauberer wrote in 2018 that DC appeared to be the first jurisdiction to put its legal code on GitHub and accept a change from a member of the public. He cautions that his edit was a technical correction needing no Council vote, and that pull requests will not replace hearings and votes. DC regulations lagged behind the Code at the time.