Over the next few days we'll be building out the site with more information about the upcoming ShmooCon lobbying trip as well as our feature roadmap. The short version is that we'll be pulling the entire United States Code into darcs, updating it via GovTrack's APIs, and providing a UI to select and fork specific sections of the law for people to collaboratively work on.
The site's going to change quickly in the coming weeks as we add more functionality. Maybe we shouldn't have launched quite this early, but there is a bit of a time crunch.
Edit: IAC, if you're interested in more DVCS-like, offline/command-line functionality, I'm totally down to support that. Tell me more about how you'd expect to interact with that?
Out of curiosity, did this come out of the aaronsw Hackathon at Noisebridge this weekend?
[wish i had been able to make it there, but was unable]
We're actually partial to darcs for this particular use case (the patch model is closer to how laws are actually amended), which ironically may decrease traction on the command-line since everyone has such a hard-on for git these days. IIRC you can use darcs via git, though.
For example: It is my contention that criminalizing noncommercial DOS attempts is highly inappropriate. They are a very good analogue for protected speech in the form of traditional protest picketing, trying to temporarily drown out and deny painless access. So long as an individual is only committing their own bandwidth to a pingstorm, this seems to me like something that should be handled as a tort. Torts have Constitutionally-limited punitive damages of ~9x demonstrated damages, fractionally allocated to the participants. A hundred thousand 4channers should damn well be able to pingstorm the Westboro Baptist Church's closet server into temporary unavailability.
Botnet-driven DDOS ordered by one person are very different beasts because they can have such a disproportionate impact, because they can be utilized for commercial goals, because they're operating from hijacked hardware, and because rent-a-botnet is common & thus more likely to ask for returns rather than be an expression of speech.
How would I go about making this change based upon consensus though?
Fundamentally, I want a user to be able to propose one or more changes by selecting a section of text and annotating it with a replacement. So there's a semantic difference between "comment" and "change". Furthermore, I also want to be able to easily select a changeset, then produce a draft output that integrates all changes from the changeset.
I think we can do this with co-ment's existing features and maybe a little bit of extra Django hackery, but before I go haring off into the internals, is this more like what you're thinking of?
