This brief analyzes the current state of federal and state government communication around benefits eligibility rules and policy and how these documents are being tracked and adapted into code by external organizations. This work includes comparisons between coded examples of policy and potential options for standardizing code based on established and emerging data standards, tools, and frameworks.
The Better Government Lab at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University has developed a new scale for measuring the experience of burden when accessing public benefits. They offer both a three-item scale and a single-item scale, which can be utilized for any public benefit program. The shorter scales provide a less burdensome way to measure by requiring less information from users.
Through our research understanding the government digital service field and what workers in this field need, we want to help strengthen those existing roles and establish more pathways for promotion and career support, as well as help other teams recognize the value of these skills and create new roles.
Using 83 interviews with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and Medicaid beneficiaries, and 35 interviews with staff from those programs, this paper examines how people differentiate their experiences across programs.
From April 13, 2020 to July 31, 2020, individuals in Kentucky who were determined to be likely eligible for food stamps after completing mRelief’s eligibility screener were randomly assigned to be in either the treatment or the control group. mRelief’s simplified application led to a statistically significant increase in SNAP application completion - from 32% in the control group (status quo) to 59% in the treated group (mRelief).
Data linking is an important tool that lets benefits program administrators efficiently determine eligibility, and ensure that applicants receive all of the benefits for which they are eligible. This resource provides examples and practical guides that explain how to use existing regulations and data sharing agreements to transfer client information or eligibility status between benefit programs.
Accounting for the strong effects of health care access, this study finds that SNAP is associated with reduced hospitalization in dually eligible older adults. Policies to increase SNAP participation and benefit amounts in eligible older adults may reduce hospitalizations and health care costs for older dual eligible adults living in the community.
This paper examines the challenges of participation in large-scale public projects. Taking its offset in a case-study of the development of a new public multimedia library, the paper discusses methods and values of Participatory Design in the face of the challenges that a project of this scale entails. These challenges concern how to address and manage a heterogeneous group of stakeholders and end-users, how to inform stakeholders and establish participation as a relevant activity, the development of new techniques and technologies to scaffold participation, and the interplay between iterative development and institutional transformation.
This paper explores three important questions for understanding how HCI configures participation; Who initiates, directs and benefits from user participation in design? In what forms does user participation occur? How is control shared with users in design? In answering these questions, the authors consider the conceptual, ethical and pragmatic problems this raises for current participatory HCI research. Finally, they offer directions for future work explicitly dealing with the configuration of participation.
This paper analyses 15 cases of design in the public sector to arrive at a theoretical characterization of design in the public sector that aligns with descriptions in non-public settings. It also considers public design practices might signal the emergence of human-centered models of public governance that counterbalance more bureaucratic and analytical traditions.
