Joshua Tauberer isn’t a legislator or Council staffer, but he still managed to find and fix a typo in a D.C. law recently.

Tauberer—an eagle-eyed citizen and member of the mayor’s open government advisory group— saw the mistake and corrected it directly via what’s known as a “pull request” on GitHub, the website where the D.C. government keeps the digital version of its legal code (and which directly updates to the D.C. Council website). As Tauberer outlines in a recent Arstechnica post, he was doing research on the city’s FOIA laws when he came upon what appeared to be a mistake: one section referred to “subchapter I of Chapter 5 of Title 2,” when it was supposed to refer to “subchapter II.”

So he turned to GitHub, opened the file containing the typo, edited the mistake, and then submitted the suggested correction. A few days later, a lawyer for the D.C. Council accepted the edit and “merged” the pull request, automatically updating the code in GitHub and on the council website.

Ostensibly, not that big of a deal. But as Tauberer—an advocate for open government who runs govtrack.us, a website that tracks Congressional legislation—puts it: “My feat highlights the groundbreaking way the District manages its legal code.”

As far as Tauberer knows, D.C. is unique in the way it stores the digital version of its laws—it puts them on GitHub, a website that software developers use to store code in a place where they can share it publicly and collaborate on changes. GitHub also helps track revisions, which it turns out is a very useful function when looking to update a massive legal code.

Because D.C. puts its laws on GitHub, anyone can access the master source and suggest revisions, just like Tauberer did. As he puts it in his post: “This isn’t a copy of the D.C. law. It is an authoritative source. It is where the D.C. Council stores the digital versions of enacted laws, and this source feeds directly into the Council’s D.C. Code website.”

It wasn’t always this way. Five years ago, Tauberer was involved (along with some other open government activists) in an effort to overhaul the way the Council was storing its legal code. Until they entered the picture, it was seemingly impossible to get a full digital non-copyrighted version of the D.C. Code. The Council stored its digital version with outside companies like West Group and LexisNexis, which copyrighted the material and made it impossible to share legally. It also led to considerable lags in updates to the D.C. Council’s website containing a copy of the code, and prevented linking to any specific part of the code (the links broke after a few minutes).

The entire drama went down like this: A D.C.-based software developer named Tom Macwright wanted to build his own website for the D.C. Code. He asked the D.C. Council to share a digital copy of the code with him, but it simply couldn’t do that. According to a blog post from Tauberer that year, West Group shared Word documents of the entire code with the Council, but the documents had West’s logo on them, and the Council couldn’t share them without risking copyright infringement (as DCist’s Martin Austermuhle wrote at the time, the companies didn’t own a copyright to the actual laws, but to their formatting online and in print). Tauberer explains in the post that while the Council had the code available online, “copying any part of the Code off of that website might violate West’s copyright or terms of service, or both. Sharing the law might have been illegal.”

This spurred Macwright,—who wrote critically about the situation at the time—Tauberer, and other activists to take the problem directly to the Council and its lawyers, whom Tauberer says have been extraordinarily receptive to making changes from the start. Lawyers got their hands on a digital copy from their contractor, removed all the copyrights from it with his help, and posted that clean digital copy onto the D.C. Council website. And thus: D.C.’s code was finally actually publicly available online.

After the hullabaloo was over, the Council eventually began its partnership with the Open Law Library, an open platform that automatically updates legal code as new laws are enacted. Tauberer says it wasn’t until after he stopped directly working with Council lawyers on this issue that the Council put its laws on GitHub. “I was the only person in the world following this all closely enough to know that this was even possible,” he says, referring to his direct edit to the code. “Well, maybe not the only one, but one of the only ones.”

This is all important, he says, because a governmental body’s laws should be fully accessible to the people governed by them. The Council and residents of D.C. should have the ability to copy the code and do what they want with it: make a searchable app, compile a website with every law relevant to traffic violations and penalties, or just download it so they can read it offline. “If you’re a lawyer working pro bono and you can’t afford to pay LexisNexis, what then?” he says. “What I want to do is raise the tide, so that people at the lower end of the food chain for legal information get better quality stuff.”