This White House GitHub Experiment Could Help Fix Government

Illustration: Cameron McEfee/GitHub

While many of our nation’s problems are quite clear, the way our government addresses them is too often a black box—opaque and closed to all but insiders and lobbyists.

But the White House has taken a remarkable–if small–step toward bringing greater transparency to the legislative process. For the first time, it has used the GitHub social coding website as a forum for discussing and ultimately changing government policy. With one GitHub “pull request,” it modified the Project Open Data policy document, which spells out how government agencies are supposed to open up access to their data. This represents the fusion of open source software and government policy that open-government advocates have long predicted. And it might be a sign of things to come as others—the city of San Francisco, and the New York state senate, to name a couple—bring collaborative government into the light.

‘We’re taking a well-known page from the open source playbook: that developing policy in an open and iterative way will create a stronger, more effective product.’

Late last week, Haley Van Dyck at the Office of Management and Budget submitted a pull request that suggested small changes to Project Open data that clarify how agencies think about open source and public domain software. Pull requests are a Silicon Valley innovation. They’re typically used by software developers on GitHub to suggest and discuss changes to code. But they’re also a good tool for tracking changes to complex legal documents, even government regulations.

While Van Dyck’s changes weren’t big, it’s important that these issues were raised and addressed in a public forum where anyone can suggest language for the policy document. “We’re taking a well-known page from the open source playbook: that developing policy in an open and iterative way will create a stronger, more effective product. The more we can involve the community, the better that product will be,” said Van Dyck—a senior adviser to the U.S. Chief Information Officer—in an email to WIRED.

The White House will wait a few weeks to review comments to the pull requests, but then Van Dyck’s changes become official government policy with the push of a button. This is open source government: The tonic that could cure the back-room deal.

By opening up the revisions and the discussions behind them, the White House is making its thinking clear, and there’s an added bonus: The changes are easier to read and understand. Compare Van Dyck’s revisions here, to Rep. Lou Barletta’s proposed changes to existing law in his Emergency Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2014. In the GitHub document, you can see the old text struck-through in red and the new additions in green. Congressional bills like Barletta’s, on the other hand, read like uncompiled source code, detailing all the changes to be made but giving the reader no idea what the finished product will look like.

That makes some bills unreadable, as far as the average citizen is concerned. “The thing that is actually voted on is the edits,” says Ben Balter, GitHub’s government evangelist. He has been working with the feds for years, convincing them to use more open-source software and adopt more of an open-source attitude. “The open government community has been talking about doing stuff like this, but it’s never reached fruition because there weren’t enough stakeholders in government.”

That’s begun to change, Balter says. He says he’s spending more time explaining to federal employees how they can use open source tools and methods. Two years ago, he was still convincing them to give open-source a shot. Now he’s watching the White House merge pull requests.