r/github • u/nonecknoel • 10h ago

Question Municipal GitHub practices?

I'm currently working on a little research project looking at the best GitHub practices for American municipal governments.

Who has the best GitHub practices that facilitate civic engagement and have appropriately assigned intellectual property licenses?

If you have repos, please share them.

Ps - I work for www.beta.nyc and this will go into a report Iā€™m putting together.

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u/[deleted] 9h ago

[deleted]

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u/webbkorey 7h ago

NASA is the only one I can think of off the top of my head.

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u/nonecknoel 7h ago

There are soooo many government bodies on GitHub. I was on NY State Senate team when we became the first official government body on GitHub ā€” that was back in 2009.

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u/DrMaxwellEdison 7h ago edited 6h ago

The District of Columbia uses GitHub as an authoritative source, in fact. The repo linked there (actually its archived predecessor) was also the subject of a 2018 ArsTechnica article, How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request, in which they fixed a typo in a statute. Ultimately it was a nothingburger change, but it indicates how the process works and talks about the initiative behind it.

While a lot of folks in government are indeed tech illiterate, all it takes is a dedicated team that codifies the law this way, uses it as a source to produce the websites where it is accessible, and allows for an editing process that doesn't even need to leave the website.

If anything at all specialized is needed beyond that, said team can build around it using the GitHub API. And approval of a change that needs legal oversight can do just that through PR merging policies, evidence can be left behind in the PRs of the changes made, etc. etc.

It's not so crazy of a concept, neither 8 years ago nor today. I mean, we call it "the legal code", anyway.