Open policy documents
22 Feb 2013My colleague Nick Jackson discusses publishing policy documents in the open on Github:
What’s interesting about using open text-based standards to write policy, Git for managing revisions and GitHub as a storage provider is that we’ve inadvertently made it very easy for people to do things that they couldn’t do before.
Where previously the process of creating policy was a bit mysterious, the entire world can now see not only the published version of the document – and by digging through the archives previously published versions – but every single change made in the history of the policy and who made it. Every change from the beginning of the document is trackable on a line-by-line basis, and using Git it’s even possible to see who is responsible for any single line of content. This gives us the immediate benefit of accountability, something which is great for finding out exactly who wrote a bit of a document if it needs clarification.