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 New South Wales government describes its efforts to connect with other Australian jurisdictions and international colleagues in its move towards making machine-consumable legislation and policy.
In this presentation, Pia Andrews explores how open source legislation as code can be a public utility to increase transparency, and enable better implementation and testing of government systems.
The first half of Rules as Code Demo Day was wrapped up with Thomas Guillet who has contributed to Open Fisca France and beta.gouv. He demoed the code for Mes Aides—or My Benefits—which is France’s social benefit simulator that leverages open source rule models for over 600 benefits while keeping the displayed complexity to its minimum.
At Rules as Code Demo Day Executive Director Zareena Mayn and Chief Technology Officer Dize Hacioglu of mRelief demoed the code for their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility screener. mRelief is a women-led team that provides a web-based and text message-based SNAP eligibility screener to all 53 states and territories that participate in SNAP. They demonstrated how they have modularized their code to host federal program rules and state-specific rules.
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.
Better Rules utilizes multidisciplinary teams that include people skilled in policy, legal, business rules, programming, and service design working together in an iterative fashion to develop rules. Several outputs are produced using this approach, each offering an opportunity that can be fed back into that iterative process and re-used to solve other issues.
The team aimed to automate applying rules efficiently by creating computable policies, recognizing the need for AI tools to convert legacy policy content into automated business rules using Decision Model Notation (DMN) for effective processing and monitoring.
Building on our February 2022 report Benefit Eligibility Rules as Code: Reducing the Gap Between Policy and Service Delivery for the Safety Net, the Beeck Center’s Digital Benefits Network (DBN) hosted Rules as Code Demo Day on June 28, 2022 where there were eight demonstrations of projects and code followed by a collaborative problem solving session on how to continue advancing rules as code for the U.S. social safety net.
