This article analyses ‘digital distortions’ in Rules as Code, which refer to disconnects between regulation and code that arise from interpretive choices in the encoding process.
This brief describes TDI’s efforts to transform federal TANF and employment data into an integrated resource for program management and evidence building. This challenging project required the resolution of multiple technical, legal, and data security issues. Lessons learned may be useful for audiences interested in unlocking the potential of administrative data, including members of federal and state agencies, researchers, and advocates of evidence-informed policymaking.
The Digital Service Network (DSN) spoke with Daniel Soto, principal management analyst at the City of Santa Ana, to learn more about how digital service innovation can occur in government organizations without formally codified or centralized digital service teams.
The Playbook’s purpose is to guide researchers while supporting and lending authority to community organizations as they advocate for partnerships that will benefit their constituencies. The Playbook aims to provide some answers to such questions as: How can technologists and scientists engage communities in a spirit of partnership, without such extractive practices? How can community organizations work with researchers in ways that benefit their communities and expand their capacity, rather than burdening their staff?
This report recommends updating the methodology used by the Census Bureau to calculate the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to reflect household basic needs and replace the current Official Poverty Measure as the primary statistical measure of poverty. The report assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the SPM and provides recommendations for updating its methodology and expanding its use in recognition of the needs of most American families such as medical care, childcare, and housing costs.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
This paper describes results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice.
CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
This paper introduces a method for auditing benefits eligibility screening tools in four steps: 1) generate test households, 2) automatically populate screening questions with household information and retrieve determinations, 3) translate eligibility guidelines into computer code to generate ground truth determinations, and 4) identify conflicting determinations to detect errors.
There are frameworks available that could inform the standardization of communicating rules as code for U.S. public benefits programs. The Airtable communicates the differences between the frameworks and tools. Each entry is tagged with different categories that identify the type of framework or tool it is.
The Digital Service Network (DSN) spoke with API Director Nicolas Diaz Amigo, GPL Fellow Mia Capone, and OMB Director Timothy Rudd to learn more about the City of Syracuse's multi-year procurement transformation initiative.
