Create a legal system from scratch
Hello, My name is General Jones. My country for the last ten years has been ruled by evil dictators, yet yesterday I successfully pulled off a coup d’état and now my country has a benevolent dictatorship…Right gentlemen? (general nervous background murmuring)
Unfortunately during the revolution two little problems occurred. My troops accidentally burned down the building that housed the only copy of the country’s laws and everyone who was in any way involved in the legal system inexplicably ran away.
Therefore I am in the position of having a country being ruled based on my personal opinion. I have to make a decision on EVERYTHING and this is seriously cutting into the time I can spend admiring my Swiss bank account and relaxing in my heavily guarded compound.
The Challenge
As a forward thinking tyrant I wish to create a legal system from scratch, I wish all laws to be easily read by my computer-literate citizens. I wish for so much transparency that the books might as well be made from glass and President Obama, by comparison, appear to be the most cloak-and-dagger-back-door-smoky-room-deals-lets-cuddle-up-to-evil-rich-people person on the planet
The Response
So, there it is, how can we go about meeting the challenge?
Lets us take a view, since I am the man in charge, lets make it MY view. In essence the rules of law are the equivalent of program source code. The rest of society is the computer that executes this source code by living according to it and enforcing it where necessary.
Anyone who has worked on a large software project and isn’t insane will say that a version control system is an essential ingredient to any successful project.
A version control system provides you with a number of things.
- History – A versioned backup of all your software code going right back to the original code.
- Accountability – Who changed what, when and why?
- Security – Who is allowed to make changes to the software.
However version control systems are not the most user-friendly systems on the planet so any version control system would have to be extremely user friendly. It would also need to be set up to cater to and reflect the organisational realities of the group that is using it.
So with all this in mind I am going to try and put this into reality. To create a website that makes the process of creating legislative documents as easy as possible.
You can follow my planning stage work in the Open Source Country project on this site.
