[KingPrad]

I disagree that version control is inappropriate. I worked for a company whose primary product was tracking government legislation through a database built on Subversion. (acted as a DB but used Subversion for a variety of reasons. I know it sounds strange).

It seemed to work fine to record incremental changes, tag specific revisions as being checkpoints for various stages of review and approvals. And anyone could search current and historical versions.

The overall legislation system needs flexibility to deal with complex and changing workflows, but storing documents (with change over time) and the links between them can be encoded just fine. As long as there are flexible ways to string them together, they can be represented in whatever structure makes sense: final law with all current amendments; original law, with amendments as annotations, separate pieces of legislation, linked by the overall law, etc. None of that has to be encoded in a super-strict heirarchy, but as long as it's all being stored in can be presented however one wants.

I don't see the fatal flaw. I see imperfections and compromises, but not the flaw so bad as to say "don't bother".

[jxramos]

The key is incremental change I agree; if legislators only interact and record changes in final form with all the mass of changes dumped onto a user for review then such a project would be untenable. Small changes would really improve usefulness, and I daydream sometimes about what sort of dodgy log messages folks would use to obscure intent. Either way it could really empower a lot of analysis I'd imagine.

Do you mind sharing with us the company and the product you developed in this space?

[walshemj]

Correct parliamentary procedure should track all motions changes and proposed changes (even those ruled out of order) to motions I certainly do as a member of a CBC / SOC (Conference Business Committee / Standing Orders Committee)