Max Baucus’ “America’s Healthy Future Act” was released today as a PDF on the painfully technically antiquated Senate Finance Committee website. (Is that a Netscape NOW! button on the left??  Welcome to 1998)  The excellent OpenCongress has a discussion on how inaccessible Congressional data is.

OpenCongress has done a great job making bills accessible, searchable, linkable, and commentable.  However, there are a few things it’s still lacking.  For instance, there’s no easy way to get a handle on the differences between all the health care reform bills, what changes have been made by different committees, and by whom.

There’s lots of talk about wanting to update congressional standards to use XML and API’s, etc.  It seems to me what they also need is a version control system.  Something like Git.  I’m thinking a git4gov or github.gov.  Imagine an obama/health-care-2009 and then each committee forks the project, makes changes, then sends a pull request upstream.  Every change to every line is attributable to a specific person/committee.  Each change has a commit message explaining the reasoning for it.  Built in commenting per line.  RSS commit logs.  Anyone could fork a bill and and make suggestions.  And of course git blame would quickly end many arguments.

Someone smarter than me, please make this happen.