I&#x27;m curious if there is research, startups, open-source projects, etc., pertaining to this topic which has intrigued me for a while.<p>Law and code are very similar conceptually it seems: they outline variables, environments, conditions, then execute procedures. The big difference being computers do one, and people do the other. Politics discusses this notion of &quot;efficient&quot; government and I want to take it even further. I&#x27;m curious about a world where, let&#x27;s take property taxes for example, we can search repositories for every implementation (procedure&#x2F;function) of property tax law (code) in a given country (within all states&#x2F;counties), and not only see it publicly (open source), but be able to use the code for testing (how effective is this &quot;algorithm&quot; for a given outcome?), RFC&#x27;s, forking across localities, tweaking, and all the other processes that work so well in software design.<p>Efficiency and smart management in software is modularization, clear roles for parts, and easy ways to plug things together (and avoid NIH syndrome) I feel like (in a programming analogy) every single city&#x2F;county&#x2F;state rewrites everything scratch all the time!<p>Of course maybe these are just different mediums that allow for very similar processes and I&#x27;m just amazed by that. But I can&#x27;t help but think there is something here.<p>So here&#x27;s the question: If in the future, a very progressive group of technophiles wanted to start a new country from scratch on a moon or space station somewhere, do you think they would do everything on a github style medium with software design type methods? Should they? Could they? Do you always need humans to enforce&#x2F;interpret the laws?
Ask HN: Government law as code?