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Content Management: The Wonders of Electronic versioning
Electronic document versioning is light years ahead of paper versioning as highlighted by a blog posting by John Wonderlich.
The example Wonderlich choose to use to demonstrate this was the different versions of the federal bailout bill. He calls the experiment a visualization of version control. The original Paulson version of the bailout bill was just a scant 3 pages. The document ballooned from 3 pages to 16, then 40, to 110
and then as many as 451 pages.
The Wonderlich experiment was to see how the versions of a bill of this size could be tracked on paper through its various incarnations. He printed the document, laying the pages side by side, and marked them up using a yellow highlighter. Without a technology assist like a wiki tool, tracking of changes and version control is tedious and almost impossible.
For the special case of the bailout bill, a version control tracking version of the legislation was created and posted on the site PublicMarkup.org. The PublicMarkup.org site comments:
“It is appalling that Congress posted this massive document the very day they intend to vote on the bill. Now more than ever, we the taxpayers need to tell Congress enough is enough. We can’t expect that citizens or lawmakers themselves can decipher such broad legislation in such a short period of time.”
PublicMarkup.org is a fascinating experiment that provides greater transparency to the process and allows citizens to participate in the drafting of legislation.
