Produced By: Academic
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After the toolkit: anticipatory logics and the future of government
This article explores how anticipatory logics—drawing from foresight, futures thinking, and design—are shaping the future of government by creating space for innovative policy approaches, public participation, and proactive governance.
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Text to Connect: Strategy + Content for Using Text Message Outreach to Reduce SNAP Churn
Focused on strategy and content, this guide offers recommendations and best practices for crafting messages, engaging clients, and obtaining consent.
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Going Big with Human-Centered Redesign
This guide provides practical insights for benefits administrators on redesigning benefits systems using human-centered design to ensure all eligible residents can access crucial social safety net resources.
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Teams that Produce Accessible Content
This guide discusses general characteristics shared by organizations that have successfully created accessible content, and includes case studies that showcase characteristics of successful accessible content teams.
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Exposing Error in Poverty Management Technology: A Method for Auditing Government Benefits Screening Tools
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.
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A Public Transformed? Welfare Reform as Policy Feedback
This article analyzes the strategic use of public policy as a tool for reshaping public opinion. Though progressive revisionists in the 1990s argued that reforming welfare could produce a public more willing to invest in anti-poverty efforts, welfare reform in the 1990s did little to shift public opinion. This study investigates the general conditions under which mass feedback effects should be viewed as more or less likely.
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Administrative Burden: Policymaking By Other Means
This book is an in-depth exploration of federal programs and controversial legislation demonstrating that administrative burden has long existed in policy design, preventing citizens from accessing fundamental rights. Further discussion of how policymakers can minimize administrative burden to reduce inequality, boost civic engagement, and build an efficient state.
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Rules as Code Community of Practice
The DBN’s Rules as Code Community of Practice (RaC CoP) creates a shared learning and exchange space for people working on public benefits eligibility and enrollment systems — and specifically people tackling the issue of how policy becomes software code. The RaC CoP brings together cross-sector experts who share approaches, examples, and challenges. Participants are from state, local, tribal, territorial, and federal government agencies, nonprofit organizations, academia, and private sector companies. We host recurring roundtable conversations and an email group for asynchronous updates, insights, and assistance.
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Syracuse University Procurement Equity Study
Report from the Syracuse University’s Center for Policy Design and Governance assessing the City of Syracuse's equity in procurement.
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Rules as code: Seven levels of digitisation
This report, written for practitioners, classifies “digital transformation” of legal rules into a hierarchy of levels to help establish common terms.
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Controlling Large Language Models: A Primer
Concerns over risks from generative artificial intelligence systems have increased significantly over the past year, driven in large part by the advent of increasingly capable large language models. But, how do AI developers attempt to control the outputs of these models? This primer outlines four commonly used techniques and explains why this objective is so challenging.
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Text to Connect: Legal + Policy Considerations for Using Text Message Outreach to Reduce SNAP Churn
This guide is intended to provide a general overview of the national statutory and regulatory landscape governing the legality of sending large volumes of text messages and sharing client information.