Regulation/legislation as code repo

This core value of this proposal for the Cardano community is to have rules as code as an open platform, a reusable utility, to support all Cardano applications that rely upon or interact with government rules. By having the pure leg/reg as code (prescriptive rules encoded, and judgement based protected and referred to), it makes regulatory compliance more automated, more consistenct and easier to build upon. This technology is not likely itself blockchain based but rather is a utility to capture and store pertinent rules from on blockchain based use cases like Smart Contracts. By having reg/leg as code, it makes it much easier to democratise access to and building of anything that needs to be provably compliance with leg/reg. It is the basis for having traceability of decisions governed by leg/reg, by supporting any system (inc smart contracts) to test against and capture in real time the pertinent rules to explain and provide explainability to users/citizens/businesses. It is not building an auditing systems, but rather it is a utility to help making other systems more auditable, when they can test against the rules, and possibly even capture the relevant rules in decision logs (like we are proposing in the Citizen's Ledger, which will no doubt leverage this capability :)).

We will develop as part of this a simple use case of a legal eligibility service for citizens, but the platform it then available with good documentation for anyone across the Cardano community to encode relevant legislation/regulation they need for other applications, to make these rules reusable across the community :) Anyone can do this kind of work, but having a platform we can all use and build upon will dramatically simplify the effort for many projects.

Team

Our team includes several Cardano community members plus members of the NZ open source community:

Pia Andrews (Project Lead and subject matter experts liaison) - Open [govt|source|data|standards|society] geek, with 20 years experience working at the intersection of government, society and technology, usually in digital or service transformation of government. Established Rules as Code programs in 4 jurisdictions to date, and now very keen to establish a community commons. https://twitter.com/piacandrews and http://pipka.org/

Hamish Fraser (RaC Platform Lead) - Hamish is a Legislation as Code researcher and practitioner, developer and builder of great and wonderful things, and co-founder of the Digital Legal Systems Lab in Aotearoa New Zealand.  https://twitter.com/verbman

Siobhan MxCarthy (Design Lead) - experienced service designers and user researcher, currently finishing her Masters, with a track record in private and public sectors. https://twitter.com/ssibbehh

Jonah Duckles (support) - Jonah's work sits at the nexus of technology and people. He works to empower and enable people to create teams and organisations that can build their own capacity to teach, learn, and imagine a better future together. https://twitter.com/jduckles

Jo Allum (support) - Co-Founder of Venture Centre, community manager and innovation commons establishment. https://twitter.com/jo_allum

Arama Maitara (intercultural expert) - intercultural navigator and facilitator with deep experience in establishing shared ways and equitable co-design towards common goals.

Brenda Wallace (developer) - experienced developer including with Rules as Code. https://twitter.com/BR3NDA

Tom Barraclough (legal lead) - Legal eagle with deep experience in the intersection of technology and law, and co-founder of the Digital Legal Systems Lab in Aotearoa New Zealand. https://twitter.com/Tom_Bcgh

Rob O'Brien (support) - Rules as Code, developer and innovator, working on self-sovereign systems for identity, culture, data and governance. https://twitter.com/robertobrien

Sacha Green (CAB liaison) - legal and policy expert, working in the Citizen Advice Bureau to help people when they are at their most vulnerable to get the help they need. https://twitter.com/sachakakariki

Key deliverables

1. reg/leg as code platform for anyone to use, preloaded with some examples.

1. documentation and howtos for the Cardano community to codify the regs/leg they will need to comply with in their applications.

1. a public facing app for vulnerable New Zealanders to understand their legal eligibility to help build confidence in getting what they are entitled, in collab with a social services organisation.

We have significant experience in this emerging space, we just need some help with freeing up capacity of a few people and partners to bootstrap a community-managed platform and establish the means to grow and mature the global open source rules as code community. We also want to build a compelling use case that brings immediate benefit to the general public built on top of the leg/reg as code commons. 

Milestones

It would be a 6 month project to deliver, but success would be measured over 12 months:

After One Month:

- Engagement with key stakeholders, establish participatory culture and easy way for public to join in
- Discovery work on target policy areas, history, understanding phase
- Discovery work with several not for profit social service providers and Iwi to inclusively design a service for anyone to understand their legal rights to benefits and services in NZ, to help the many people suffering from financial hardship, which has been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic.

After Three Months:

- Establish the platform and tools for a public commons of legislation and regulation as code, including the rules as code platform, extendable test suite, common variables library.
- Encoding complete of first use case: domestic legislation in the first instance, namely key New Zealand benefits legislation (Covid payments, Rates Rebate, Social Security Act) both to establish the platform with something real, and to support and provide the rules platform to support a high value use case (below).
- Alpha phase complete of the legal eligibility service, with public feedback and testing.

After Six Months:

- Establish the documentation and support for anyone to get involved and start adding their own leg/red as code into a global commons.
- Legal eligibility tool is deployed as a Beta and is  being used by CAB and other social service providers for tens of thousands of people every week to better understand their eligibility for services, and feel more confident to get the help they are entitled to.

After Twelve Months:

- The platform and service continue to operate, improve and be expanded.
- Success will be measured by a few metrics: 1) 100 people contributing to the rules as code platform with new leg/reg by 6 months after platform launch. 2) at least 5 applications built on top of the platform. 3) 5000 vulnerable people use the app (directly or indirectly) to identify their legal eligibility for support services within 12 months. 4) a 5% increase in first year of people getting their eligible benefits. 5) government departments requesting support to improve the explainability and veracity of at least 2 key gov systems.

Budget:

- Platform: This would be done with a small but competent platforms team (3 people) over the course of 3 months ($50k). The public launch would be in February/March for early visibility and public testing of the rules as code.

- Know your legal eligibility service: a product team (3 people), and would result in an MVP within 4 months, for continuous testing and iteration beyond this funding ($40k). The tool would immediately be used by a major not for profit social services organisation, immediately benefiting tens of thousands of vulnerable people every day.

The "your legal rights" service will grow public confidence and improve the support available to our most vulnerable, and creates a greater appetite and requirement for departments to ensure explainability in their systems. We expect departments to not like this much, but we have full legal backing that a community interpretation of law as code is no less authoritatative than a departmental interpretation, because only the source legislation is authoritative. We do know that internal business systems in departments does not distinguish the legal rule (legislation/regulation) from operational rules, and this conflict means operational rules can contradict the law, leading to unjust outcomes for our most vulnerable.

The initiative will grow domestic and international capability, increase demand for and confidence in rules/leg/reg as code (as a utility, rather than hardcoded into systems), and provides open digital infrastructure to build upon by anyone and to contrast and compare with government business systems, that are in large part, not explainable (certainly in NZ). It also provides a check and balance for automated decision making and high veracity AI which can be leveraged by research institutes in NZ and globally, and we have AI organisations here who would love to leverage legislation and regulation as code to ensure more high veracity and more trustworthy use of AI and automated decision making.

UPDATE: we have reduced the asking amount due to advice from the community, and we have reduced our team and scope slightly, with one of our team members now able to do their part of the work from their day job..