The article discusses key takeaways from BenCon 2023, highlighting the importance of creating equitable and ethical public benefits technology. It emphasizes the need for tech solutions that address systemic inequalities, ensure accessibility, and promote inclusivity for underserved communities in accessing public services.
We kicked off Rules as Code Demo Day with Alex Soble of 18F and Mike Gintz of 10x presenting their Eligibility APIs Initiative that explores whether APIs and rules as code might improve the efficiency and effectiveness with which federal public benefits programs communicate their policy to states. They demonstrated their original prototype, and how the open source code has now been extended into several initiatives.
This paper introduces the problem of semi-automatically building decision models from eligibility policies for social services, and presents an initial emerging approach to shorten the route from policy documents to executable, interpretable and standardised decision models using AI, NLP and Knowledge Graphs. There is enormous potential of AI to assist government agencies and policy experts in scaling the production of both human-readable and machine executable policy rules, while improving transparency, interpretability, traceability and accountability of the decision making.
The Benefit Cliffs Calculator helps case managers and public benefit recipients to prepare for benefit cliffs (i.e., declines in benefits due to an increase in earnings). It compares the net resources and benefits available to families under different employment scenarios.
This is the summary version of a report that documents four experiments exploring if AI can be used to expedite the translation of SNAP and Medicaid policies into software code for implementation in public benefits eligibility and enrollment systems under a Rules as Code approach.
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 recap of the two-day conference focused on charting the course to excellence in digital benefits delivery hosted at Georgetown University and online.