The Digital Service Network (DSN) spoke with three staff members from the Digital Transformation Team in Montgomery County Public LIbraries—Maddie Schellhardt, Raymond Bryson, and Emily Lamancusa, to learn more about the county's efforts to advance digital service delivery and inclusion
This Urban Institute report identifies strategies to improve young people’s access to public benefits through targeted outreach, benefit navigation, cross-organizational partnerships, and streamlined eligibility processes.
Jennifer Pahlka, Deputy CTO in President Obama’s Administration and author, shares her new book, Recoding America on how government must be equipped for digital delivery in order to meet ambitious policy goals. This video was recorded at the Digital Benefits Conference (BenCon) at Georgetown University on June 14, 2023.
This benefits protection toolkit is a step-by-step guide to develop and integrate a benefits protection strategy into your Direct Cash Transfer (DCT) program design. This toolkit includes a set of customizable templates, letters, and other tools which should be downloaded and modified for your pilot and local context.
mRelief is a nonprofit that helps individuals in all 53 U.S. states and territories determine SNAP eligibility and apply using easy-to-use web and text tools. Their simplified, inclusive approach has supported over 2.7 million people and unlocked over $1 billion in benefits, focusing on minimizing barriers and adapting eligibility rules across states.
We wrapped up Rules as Code Demo Day with Max Ghenis and Nikhil Woodruff, the founders of PolicyEngine. The PolicyEngine web app computes the impact of tax and benefit policy in the US and the UK. With PolicyEngine, anyone can freely calculate their taxes and benefits under current law and customizable policy reforms, and also estimate the society-wide impacts of those reforms. Policymakers and think tanks from across the political spectrum can analyze actual policy. PolicyEngine is built atop the open source OpenFisca US and UK microsimulation models and they are building an open unified data set utilizing data from the Policy Rules Database, Current Population Survey, Survey of Consumer Finances, Consumer Expenditures, tax records, and IRS Public Use File.
MITRE’s Joe Ditre and Frank Ruscil demoed the code for the Comprehensive Careers and Supports for Households (C-CASH) at Rules as Code Demo Day. The MITRE team expanded the accessibility of the Policy Rules Database and the Cost-of-Living Database (the prior demo) by creating a web service API and a front-end Window’s application called C-CASH Analytic Tool (CAT). CAT provides a more scalable, flexible, and portable functionality which allows end-users to generate various households to run eligibility scenarios across different U.S. counties and states. They are currently working to create a national data hub and analytics tool, starting with utilizing U.S. Census data and populating the data warehouse by pushing large amounts of data through the PRD.
This report explores strategies for developing a new generation of technologists dedicated to public interest work, emphasizing the need for a stronger talent pipeline to support government and nonprofit technology initiatives.
The ubiquity of mobile devices makes it imperative to build “mobile first” services, i.e. services built with the expectation that they will primarily be accessed on mobile devices. This article also outlines important considerations and suggestions for implementing mobile-first user interfaces.
Code for America offers government agencies a general overview of getting started with implementing text messaging services for clear, responsive communication during the COVID-19 pandemic.
