On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 10:52 PM, stef <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 09:16:50PM +0100, Francis Davey wrote: >> As it happens we do have an "easier" way to work this out for bills. A >> bill is printed at several stages through Parliament (representing the >> fact that it used to be expensive to do this - it originates at a time >> when amendments were scribbled onto a text and then written up later). >> Between those stages amendments are proposed in a form that explains >> in a formulaic (though English) fashion how those changes will affect >> the bill. In other words a "diff" written in Parliamentary language.
I'm curious to see the difference with us, can you point to an example? > > indeed, also on eu level a similar approach is taken. It is usually easier for EU, for example it wasn't hard to extract this: http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/Rapport_Gallo_Amendments (Even if the amendments are in .doc format, the template they use adds additional xml which is not displayed but is captured when copy/pasting or using conversion tools) Instead of describing the diff in legalese, they directly show a context diff, in my opinion that's easier to deal with. I don't think this kind of diff are used elsewhere, in older institution. At least here, in France we have the formulaic diffs (and scanned non-ocr-ed amendments for the commission reading...). > >> Free My Bills will (hopefully) work that way but because there is a >> hope that we can persuade a sane Parliament to do the right thing and >> mark its bills up properly there's a reluctance to try to build a >> really cool tool to do the job in advance. I guess it depend on the ratio IT people/editor in the parliamentary services... if they already do most of the stuff by hand and have the staff for it, it might be hard to change, they don't have many incentive to provide it themselves. (i.e. in France I can see it happen in one of the chamber, where they have a big internal IT staff, but on the other where they outsource everything, less so). cheers, Benoit (regardscitoyens.org member / laquadrature.net contributor) _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
