Where’s the Github for Government?

@maxwellterry left an incredibly thought-provoking comment on Hacker News the other day:

We just need the Constitution, U.S. Code, and state laws on a DVCS. It wouldn’t need to even be official; representatives would just essentially make the formal commit of publicly popular diffs, or lose reelection.

As I’ve been learning about some of the more advanced version control mechanisms and have now had a good amount of experience with several different version control systems, I’m wondering why we don’t already have decent version control for policy and law.

Probably because government officials don’t see what’s in it for them, and citizens don’t yet understand the benefits well enough to make a fuss. What a shame.