laws

1. Maybe state laws would be a better place to start. It's more plausible that a hacker could get into a state house/senate/gubernatorial position and elicit change at a local level. Also, there's potentially more room for refactoring than feature changes.

2. The same way software commits or Wikipedia edits are evaluated. Discussion and voting. As with OSS and Wikipedia, few would actually propose changes, but it's better than the current system (which is closer to the model of proprietary software and traditional encyclopedias).

3. As ry's node is the official Node.js, "usgov" would host the legally binding repo, and individuals would simply have their own non-binding forks. Congress's role would shift to primarily merging in pull requests.

4. I imagine most aren't interested in proposing laws any more than they are in editing Wikipedia. But everyone would benefit from a more succinct, optimized legal structure, as they do from a better source of information.

This is all really beside what I had in mind though. I don't think there's much point trying to do anything official, in cooperation with the current government. The way you improve Windows is by building a better operating system, not directly trying to change Windows.

Perhaps MediaWiki (or similar) would be a better choice. The (incomplete) U.S. Code is up on WikiSource (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Code).

Maybe you're right. This would be like trying to carve out an optimal Lisp with CL as one's starting point. A better approach might be to begin with the Constitution (as pg did with McCarthy's original paper) and "restart the kind of [legal] design" the founders were "doing at the point where [they] left off." (http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html)