Bring back the constitution to the people!

We are part of the Open Data movement and supports the Open Definition. Our way is to „hack“ on documents and build Free Software around them—our goal is to bring open data to governments—our idea is to re-publish constitutions, law texts, and any other public documents in a way everyone and everything may use them.

DocPatch is our platform to provide these documents to you. It relies on some simple tools from software development. The „heart“ of this platform is a version control system (vcs) to manage the documents with their complete history and additional meta information. The documents itself are written in a markup language which allows us a) to use any text editor and b) to convert the texts into any format we want.

This is our current tool stack:

• vcs: git
• converter: pandoc
• markup language: markdown

These tools are simple to use, but powerful, widely spread, and open. (Even if they won't fit any more in the future, they could be replaced by other, even better tools. For distributing the repositories, the code, the generated documents, and everything else we use some more tools, e. g. web server, operating system,…, but they don't matter for our intended purpose.)

Our first target is the German constitution, called „Grundgesetz“. First published in March 23th 1949 it was changed ca. 60 times. It's interesting to see why it was changed, when, by whom and under what circumstances. The good is: All information is public. The bad: The information doesn't match the Open Definition and many details are hard to find.

In short: We are putting the complete "Grundgesetz" under version control and publish it.

Everthing is under heavy development. Still in progress. Under construction. We need your help to make DocPatch a success!

We are looking for people who create some fancy tools, design a cool website, define more milestones, or simply versionize with us. Take a look at grundgesetz