18F, a consultancy within the U.S. General Services Administration, developed a prototype API and pre-screener to model federal SNAP eligibility rules, aiming to simplify benefits access through open-source technology.
The team conducted experiments to determine whether clients would be responsive to proactive support offered by a chatbot, and identify the ideal timing of the intervention.
The team developed an AI solution to assist benefit navigators with in-the-moment program information, finding that while LLMs are useful for summarizing and interpreting text, they are not ideal for implementing strict formulas like benefit calculations, but can accelerate the eligibility process by leveraging their strengths in general tasks.
A recap of the two-day conference focused on charting the course to excellence in digital benefits delivery hosted at Georgetown University and online.
The Digital Identity Community of Practice kick-off event featured key resources, a new research publication on account creation and identity proofing, and insights from multiple speakers.
A framework that helps policy and digital service teams interpret legislation by identifying user needs, intent, and implementation challenges to support more effective, human-centered government service delivery.
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.
This course from the European Commission aims to provide participants with a comprehensive understanding of Law as Code and its relationship to digital-ready policymaking.
At Rules as Code Demo Day we heard from Song Hia of the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity and Ethan Lo of the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation who demoed the NYC Benefits Platform Screening API which provides machine-readable calculations and criteria for benefits screening that power the ACCESS NYC screening questionnaire. This makes it easier for NYC residents to discover multiple benefits they may be eligible for. The City is now extending the API to support the new MyCity platform, a one-stop shop for all services and benefits.
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
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.
