7.1 Rules as Code projects around the world - Rules-as-Code-League/RaC-Handbook GitHub Wiki
This is not a comprehensive list. Newer and more current projects are at the top.
Canada: In 2020, the Canadian government kicked off a multi-agency RaC discovery project involving the Canada School of Public Service, the Department of Justice, the Labor Program (Employment and Social Development Canada; EDSC) and the Community of Federal Regulators. Scott McNaughten has been documenting this process on Medium. They are looking in particular at Sections 12 and 13 of the Canada Labour Standards Regulations. Jason Morris is playing along - this post in particular is a helpful overview on how a Rules as Code project can be structured. The project has built a prototype leave entitlements calculator.
Read more:
- Part 1: a quick intro to RaC
- Part 2: a more detailed description of the Canadian discovery project and what they learned
- Presentation on Discovery Project to the Community of Federal Regulators (October 2020)
- CFR Experimentation wiki
In 2021, Canada is working on a Policy Difference Engine.
Singapore: In March 2020, the Singapore Management University was awarded a $15 million grant to do research into computational law, and established the Centre for Computational Law.
France: The French Government has developed the open rules engine OpenFisca and coded their tax laws to create several tax calculators to help people understand how the laws apply in practice ('Mes Aides').
Mes Aides was shut down in 2020 and an NGO was been established to continue it as a community-run project - MesAides.org.
The government incubator beta.gouv.fr is leading new rules as code initiatives - read more in this blog post - Coding Legislation for the Benefit of Citizens (in French)
Australia
In October 2020, the Australian Research Council announced $31.8 AUD in funding for a new national research centre — The ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. The new Centre aims to create the knowledge and strategies necessary for responsible, ethical, and inclusive automated decision-making, combining social and technological disciplines in an international industry, research and civil society network.
Australia - NSW: The NSW Department of Customer Service is currently experimenting with Rules as Code.
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Community Gaming Regulation 2020: In October 2020, the NSW Government published the human and machine readable rules of this Regulation in parallel as part of a collaborative rules as code project. A front-end form has also been developed that extracts the questions to ask the user and the references to the regulation, from the NSW Openfisca API. The questionnaire makes it easier for charities and non-profits to understand whether they can conduct a community gaming activity (lottery, bingo, etc.). It also tells the user whether they need a permit/authority from the NSW government for conducting it.
NSW Rules as Code Showcase (11 April 2019):
- Video: https://vimeo.com/329720314
- Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/TimdeSousa/rules-as-code-showcase-11-april-2019/1
- NSW OpenFisca rules source code: https://github.com/Openfisca-NSW
- NSW Rules Explorer: http://nsw-rules-dev.herokuapp.com/
Australia: CSIRO/Data61 is developing a logic system to turn human-readable text into machine-readable code.
Australia: The Australasian Legal Information Institute (Austlii) has built a rule-base legal inferencing platform called DataLex. They have used this platform to build a proof-of-concept chatbot that interprets s44 of Australia’s Constitution and can answer questions on whether a person is eligible to stand for Parliament. In October 2020, they also used the DataLex platform to build a tool to interpret the NSW Community Gaming Regulation.
New Zealand: SmartStart – This website provides information about government and other services that new parents need when they have a baby, from the point of conception to 6 months after birth. Amongst other things, it combines the eligibility rules for 18 financial benefits for new parents. It is powered by a rules engine, built on OpenFisca. Users can submit anonymised demographic information, and the site returns information about which rebates the subject is eligible for.
Denmark: Denmark has developed 7 principles for digital-ready legislation that forms part of their legislative drafting process.
USA: The US District of Columbia makes its legislation available in XML format and publicly available for software developers to use and comment on.