An open-source style policy repository.
The Open Policy Project aims to aggregate and propagate good policy, irrespective of the kind. The best policy implementations are often specific to the place it is implemented in, but good policy ideas will work in many places to solve similar problems. For example, California recently passed an ADU, or “Granny flat” law, allowing for specific kinds of denser housing, and South Bend, Indiana passed a housing infill law that helps builders cut through red tape for certain housing projects. Both of these policies aim to make building more housing easier, and both could be generalized, or templated, so other states and cities could implement them.
An issue for cities and towns is developing the policy itself, so often policy is taken from somewhere else. This is why so much of zoning is the same across the United States: it’s just easier for places without huge resources to adopt a standard, in this case a federal standard. This policy project aims to create a new standard procedure for generalizing policy, one developed by professionals, academics, activists, and policymakers together, then adapted to specific locales by the people who live there and understand the specific needs.
A simple and effective way to do this is to use git or a similar versioning system. The choice in this repository is clearly to use Github, but this does not have to be a final decision. Public repositories allow anyone to see the policy documents, open issues to propose new policy or changes to existing policy, and the foundation for a community-oriented set of procedures for adding and changing policy. Policy can be stored in a series of folders navigable in the web UI, editing tools on a local machine, or even Finder, making it an accessible tool. Anyone can “fork” the repository, creating their own version of it that can be kept up-to-date with the main version or differ greatly. These differences can be contributed back to the main version, creating a distributed network of contributors. Changes to policy can be easily tracked through version history to see who made what changes and when. The platform can also be used to generate wikis to more easily read and navigate policy.
In this way a policy suite can be built, both at a general level of policy templates and at a local level of necessary detail. The policy templates can be based on existing, working policy, like the two examples of zoning policy previously mentioned. These templates would generalize the existing implementations, for example removing details about the kinds of housing that can be built in South Bend’s infill law, but keeping most of the language the same. Now other cities and towns would have a boilerplate template from which to draft their own laws, lowering the barrier to entry for activists, community groups, or even low-resource governments to draft details. The process can be made even easier if, separately, the details to fill in boilerplate policy can be provided at different scales. In the infill law case, this could be giving a range of different plot types and a host of building plans that a community could choose from, potentially even donated, in the spirit of open-source projects, by professional architects.
Thus the collective intelligence of the internet can be tapped to gather and provide ideas, templates, and resources for under-resourced localities to leverage, allowing cities to be leaders where they have resources and considerate followers where they do not.
See CONTRIBUTING.md.