Wow, now this is great. First it was GitHub… okay, I guess not really. My point is that GitHub was the first big player that I saw demonstrating the technique for others to follow. Specifically, putting the source text of legal terms/codes up on GitHub, from which software uses to automatically generate web-friendly publication versions, print versions, etc. Now, Washington DC of the United States is officially doing likewise with the DC legal code. In case you were suspecting/wondering, indeed, the older processes that lawmakers used 10-20 years before was to create draft documents in Microsoft Word, then manually merge them together. This is important to note, however. It’s not like using software automation to merge drafts and generate the final document couldn’t be done at the time. It’s that the talent pool of people in the earlier law field weren’t very experienced with computers at the time, so using the most user-friendly solution was the key, even if it mean that other things would be less efficient.
20181211/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/how-i-changed-the-law-with-a-github-pull-request/