The Service Innovation Lab (the Lab) partnered up with Legal Hackers NZ and Accenture to run the Wellington Better Rules Hack as part of Techweek’18. This weekend event explored the ideas and practice of turning legislation into machine-consumable ‘digital rules’ that can be reused and integrated across domains for the benefit of government, businesses, individuals, and communities. Around 40 people attended the event, which was hosted by Assurity and sponsored by Accenture, Catalyst Cloud, Ensprial Dev Academy, Legal Hackers NZ, and Victoria University of Wellington.
Lawyers, developers, service designers, policy advisors, data specialists and other keen individuals came from Wellington, Auckland, Tasmania, Taranaki and San Francisco. They got to know each other and formed 5 teams that rapidly turned multiple pieces of legislation into digital rules, to create working prototype applications that benefit people.
Participants were able to use open APIs (Application Programme Interfaces) of the digital rules powering the Smartstart financial help tool and the Rates Rebate Alpha (read more about our work on Rates Rebate). Data61 provided participants with a Regulation as a Platform development environment, and the Lab stood up the Aotearoa New Zealand OpenFisca instance.
Like with most hackathons, it was an intense weekend, but all the participants, mentors and helpers enjoyed the experience and learned a lot from each other. It resulted in the delivery of 5 practical demonstrations of the opportunities that legislation as code/digital rules offer, contributed NZ legislation into the Lab’s open source entitlement rules engine (in OpenFisca), and formed the beginnings of a supportive community to for this work. Participants could see how legislation as code is both an operational and strategic asset for government digital transformation.
Participants identified some key opportunities and challenges of legislation as code/digital rules:
Legislation as code enables:
- digital service delivery that works for people by hiding the complexity of multiple rule sets and giving them greater certainty about their eligibility or obligations
- greater opportunities for democratic participation in the development and improvement of legislation
- improving the logic and consistency within and across different rule sets, particularly if implemented as Linked Data using URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers).
Challenges of turning legislation in to code:
- You have to first know how government works to be able to find all the rules that apply to a given scenario.
- The process flow as laid out in the legislation made it difficult to discern the eligibility rules from the calculation rules, and added to the work of making the process flow work for people.
- Some legislation has terminology and definitions that are not internally consistent, and some terms are not defined leaving interpretation up to the individual.
We’re following up on the success of this hackathon with another one in Tauranga on the weekend of 28-29 July. See the Better Rules Hack website for more information.
Highlights from the Better Rules Hack
Better Rules Hack entries
Organic coders
Making the live organ donor process easier for donors.
Project website: organiccoders.allengeer.com
Legislation used as code:
- Live Organ Donor Compensation Act 2016
- KiwiSaver Act 2006
- Income Tax Act of 2007
- Accident Compensation Act 2001
Github repository: https://github.com/OrganicCoders
EnActivity
Version control for legislation by making it work like open source software where people can track law changes and suggest improvements.
Project website: https://jamestingedwards.github.io/legis-hack/
Legislation used as code:
- Started with the Privacy Act 1993 then pulled in over 40 pieces of legislation from legislation.govt.nz
Github repository: https://github.com/jamestingedwards/legis-hack
Start a business
A question-and-answer chatbot-style system that guides prospective business owners through the processes to register their business and be otherwise compliant.
Project website: https://thinktank.co.nz/startabiz/
Legislation used as code:
- Companies Act 1993
- Accident Compensation Act 2001
- Income Tax Act of 2007
- Health and Safety at Work Act 2015
- Wellington City Council by-laws
Github repository: https://github.com/mathematiguy/conversational-form
Also read Dave Moskovitz's blog post about his experience in this team
Best Start
Mobile responsive website that help parents to calculate how much money they might get per week, per child under the new Best Start tax credit.
Legislation used as code:
- Best Start tax credit
- Income Tax Act of 2007
- Families Package (Income Tax and Benefits) Act 2017
- Tax Administration Act 1994
Github repository: http://github.com/jmhbnz/openfisca-aotearoa.git
1st Homework
To make it easier for prospective home-buyers to determine whether they are eligible for Government assistance, particularly for the KiwiSaver HomeStart grant, and given changing Loan to Value Ratio restrictions imposed by the Reserve Bank.
Legislation used as code:
- rules concerning eligibility for a HomeStart grant, from s8 of Schedule 1 of the Kiwisaver Act 2006
- from Reserve Bank document BS19-Framework-for-LVR-restrictions-Oct2016, issued under s68 of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act 1989
Github repository: https://github.com/JudyPuff/1stHomework
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