An adaptive toolset—Infrastructure for impactful policy

Better rules and rules as code references

• The first Better Rules Discovery Report from NZ (by Nadia Webster) and video by MBIE
• Legislation as code for New Zealand: opportunities, risks and recommendations and also Governing digital legal systems by Tom Barraclough and Hamish Fraser
• Cracking the code: rulemaking for humans and machines and the Global Innovation in Government Trends 2019 (OECD)
• The NSW Rules as Code Emerging Tech Primer (the NSW Gov Policy Lab)
• Accident Compensation Act (NZ) Better Rules Discovery Report (ACC)
• Applying Rules as Code for city planning and consenting (Wellington Council)
• Experimenting with Rules as Code by the Canadian Community of Federal Regulators, and the Canadian School of Public Service
• A March 2021 report by the Law Foundation in NZ on Rules as Code. An adaptive toolset— Infrastructure for impactful policy “Policy infrastructure” isn’t a term that’s often used in government, and yet public servants use and rely upon policy infrastructure every day. Policy infrastructure includes the data, tools and platforms that help us to analyse, design, model, implement, automate, iterate, monitor and report on policies and policy interventions, throughout the entire policy lifecycle. Policy infrastructure necessarily includes an enormous range of software, data and platforms, because any one tool that tries to do it all will never work. Policy infrastructure is used to support both the design and development of new policies, as well as the delivery, ongoing management and evaluation of policy interventions. If we are to include all policies (constitution, legislation, regulation, government objectives, operational requirements, department rules, whole of government requirements, etc), then there is a large and complex canvas of goals, success metrics, rules, requirements, eligibility criteria, formulae and requirements that need to be reflected in the policy infrastructure, relied upon by many. In the age of digitally-enabled governments, the scope of policy infrastructure has expanded to include digital policy delivery and policy as code. Unfortunately, there is traditionally no consistent or end-to-end approach to policy infrastructure - policy is created, implemented, measured, and amended by different actors, often working in isolation from each other. This inconsistency means there is no visibility of the whole policy journey by anyone involved, and a significant air gap between how policy is represented in modeling tools, and how policy is represented in the real world systems of service delivery government departments or regulated entities.

This also creates a significant gap between the predicted impact policies are expected to have, and the broader impacts they have in reality. No modeling is perfect, and unexpected conflicts or variables will emerge as policy is implemented in real time. For instance, social security and taxation legislation is extensively modeled in policy agencies for the purpose of reform and budget analysis, but the same legislation is implemented separately (and sometimes differently) in delivery departments, where new variables exist such as system constraints, integration with other policy domains, operational rules and, of course, the intersection of cross-jurisdictional policies. Without access to the insights of the people tasked to deliver policy, policymakers and legislative/regulatory drafters may be unaware of the risks or conflicts, and unable to build in mitigations. In any case, when unintended conflicts or impacts inevitably emerge, there are limited ways to influence or iterate policy design. Policy impact and outcomes are often not consistently measured or monitored across interventions. For instance, policy or evaluation teams might use administrative data to analyse policy impacts at a point in time, but delivery teams tend to monitor for system performance and customer experience. Imagine if all our services also enabled real time measurement of policy outcomes and broader quality of life or environmental impacts? It is possible a policy intervention like a public service or grant program might be considered successful in delivery (efficient, good user feedback) that is simultaneously having an inverse policy impact, or creating unintended harms. So measuring and monitoring for both policy and human impact is a critical next step to build into policy infrastructure. The final challenge in this space is the lack of shared or common policy infrastructure, because it exacerbates interpretation confusion and mutual incomprehension between policy design and policy delivery. The diagram below presents a high level view of the current state challenge of fragmented policy infrastructure, and contrasts it with the idea of shared policy infrastructure. All actors involved in a given policy domain (including all relevant policy interventions) would ideally have access to the same shared policy infrastructure, the same digital representation of policy (“policy twins”), the same modeling and monitoring tools, feedback loops and perhaps even a shared “policy backlog”. Perhaps policy infrastructure could be shared across policy domains, or even open to the public, to facilitate transparency, alternative modeling, and testing policy options or proposed reforms in a wide variety of contexts to help identify potential or unintended consequences, and to maximise intended policy outcomes. Below is a list of “adaptive tools”, or policy infrastructure, which are worth investing in and building for your policy agenda, and ideally as a persistent capability for your public institution. Participatory governance infrastructure Getting the public involved in policymaking, management and optimisation is a great way to both leverage a broader set of insights, expertise and experience, but also a way to help the policy outcomes be better realised through public support. Participatory governance tools include co-design tools, public communications and engagement tools, modelling, prototyping and much more. Below are the four types of public engagement, which inform the tools required. There are four broad levels of practical participation in public governance, but all have the critical first characteristic of being discoverable. Public visibility, including to relevant organisations and community groups enables discovery, and people can only participate in what they know about. In a heavily time-poor society, you also need to plan for and create space, opportunity and effort into getting diverse views into the room in a way that is equitable. Level 0: request for comment. This is where Departments release discussion papers for comment or feedback, which usually means there is substantial work done to shape a direction in a paper that is published for feedback, and then people are effectively invited to just tweak what has been created. Engagement varies, with some consultations just publishing online, and some going all out to proactively engage with stakeholders and community groups.

• Pros: easy to do, tends to focus feedback in a pre-defined direction.

• Cons: normative outcomes, tends to focus feedback in a pre-defined direction.

• Tools: website and email. Level 1: user centered practices. Any form of early engagement with “end users” of a strategy, policy, program, service or piece of regulation is helpful as a form of participatory design, but isn’t really participatory governance. It is a useful form of getting more participation in public sector processes, but do not mistake it as sufficient for participatory policy, because engaging with users is still seeing people as consumers rather than co-creators in the overarching policy intent. However it can be useful at different phases of policy navigation, particularly to improve the design and effectiveness of policy interventions. When you engage with the end users of your work, you have a better chance of meeting their actual needs. If you don’t engage with end users or a representation of the community you serve, to understand them and test different approaches with them, then you are simply imagining or hoping people will use/ interact with your work in the way you intend. For service delivery, we have all seen User-Centred Design (UCD) becoming mainstream in many public sectors, resulting in better designed and more intuitive service delivery. Sometimes UCD also includes observing user behaviours (the lawn experiment). The Life Journey approach takes this even further to understand end user journeys across organisations and sectors around complex events. In the policy profession there has been some early adoption of UCD and agile methods for policy (eg, NSW Policy Lab) to develop policy artefacts that are easier for policy consumers to understand and implement. In legislation and regulation design, we’ve seen bringing end users into the room result in profoundly better rules and outcomes (Better Rules work, NZ).

• Pros: work gets shaped around actual user needs and the testing approach assures a better quality output with more predictable implementation. There are well understood methods with many skilled professionals available. Usually participation is equitable because diversity is necessarily sought and compensated for inclusive design.

• Cons: even though the work output is better shaped, you still get a somewhat normative outcome because the broad direction is largely set in that you are engaging people only as end users which assumes the product is necessary. There is a subtle power imbalance to be careful of as it can too easily focus feedback in a pre-defined direction, for example “which design is better” as opposed to “is this the right thing to be doing at all”?.

• Tools: websites, email, wireframing tools, mockups/prototyping, user testing tools, engagement tools. Level 2: participatory drafting. This is where something is still in an early or formative phase, and you engage publicly or externally in helping shape it from the start, which is quite different to user centred practices, where you engage with end users primarily to just understand and test their needs. Participatory drafting can draw out some profound ideas, assumptions and experience very early, to help shape something from the start. It requires strong support for getting the right outcome and an appetite for having flexibility in the direction of the thing. This approach creates a little more work up front, and can lead in quite a different direction than first anticipated, but gets something that is likely faster to implement, with greater public support, and results that are more durable and sustainable. Good examples of participatory drafting include the Taiwan approach taken to co-draft Uber legislation in Taiwan (2015), the New Zealand Police wiki for participatory legislation (2009), the Australian Public Spheres done by Senator Kate Lundy to co-draft policy recommendations (2008-2009) which included public contributions to the Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report of 2009 and citizen Policy Juries in Canada (2010-13) which were also used in New Zealand for a time. Other examples of participatory drafting could include public proposal systems, which aren’t just about feedback, but that enable completely new ideas, like public ideation or participatory budgeting projects. Ideation work and participatory drafting work has been done in Australia for years with local examples including work by engage2, Democracy 2025, Bang the Table and many many more community or company led participatory programs. The question to my mind is why we haven’t yet seen this become normal public sector process? Something worth unpacking for your organisation.

Participatory budgeting can range from project nomination and voting, tools to explore visibility of budgetary decision impacts, direct decisions or old school consultations. Some examples include Porte Alegre, Brazil since 1989, NSW’s My Community Dividend and Iceland’s Iceland’s Better Reykjavik. Service examples are trickier because even internally, the scope of a service is often defined by policy, legislation or strategy, so it is in these early phases where participatory drafting is most powerful. Although a lot of public servants seek external feedback for their work (policy, legislation, services, etc) through subject matter experts, industry engagement, stakeholder engagement or consultants, the value of public participation in drafting or designing is that you get a perspective from the people who will be affected by the work, not just those with a subject matter expertise, business or contractual imperative.

• Pros: much more formative method for overall direction, gains greater public trust and support through their participation, better quality outcomes informed by public values as well as a broad range of experience and expertise.
• Cons: unless the coordinators make an explicit effort to enable equitable and diverse participation, this method can too easily create over-representation of privileged groups who have time and skills, and who aren’t intimidated by government. Extra effort needs to be made to ensure representative and inclusive participation.
• Tools: Holopolis platform (Taiwan), sms/email, prototyping, modelling tools, communications and cooperation tools such and forums, wikis, whiteboards, mockup/prototyping tools, AI Level 3: system co-design or “walking together” through to co-delivery All the methods above involved people at different levels of influence in the work, with increasing levels of flexibility in direction. Genuine co-design is rare but is the most powerful of participatory governance mechanisms, as it necessarily involves bringing two or more parties together on an equal footing to determine shared goals, methods and values, and actually design and decide the way forward together. This means being flexible on all aspects of the work, including, perhaps, the idea it isn’t appropriate at all. It is the most disruptive to a centralised or top down way of working, but does yield the best results, especially for wicked problems. It is also the best at avoiding potential or even accidental exclusive (single purpose or homogenous) design by the people responsible for the policy or services. This approach is most useful in transformative agendas where the public institutions involved are open to new ideas to drive better outcomes, or address systemic challenges or opportunities. A few good examples include the Walk Together design methodology (more information here) which is a culturally responsive design approach, the participatory action research work done for the Both Ways report (2004), and exemplary work done by Old Ways, New in bringing design, culture and technology together. When initiatives are then co-delivered, you get a profound impact through systemically motivated partners collaboratively delivering around shared or common goals. Some of the co-design and co-delivery work done in South East Queensland during the 2005 floods is useful to learn from, where government co-designed and co-delivered a work program to respond to the crisis. Indeed, a lot of great co-design and co-delivery seems to happen when there is a crisis, the question is how we can bring it into business as usual.
• Pros - is the best path for working through complexity or “wicked problems” and for designing sustainable solutions that don’t just include people in the process, but enables them to genuinely shape it in accordance with their values.
• Cons: requires the most commitment, flexibility and support. Requires time, skills, relationship building and longer term deadlines to get to a point of genuine consensus through engagement and co-design, noting this isn’t a con, but makes it harder unless teams in government are supported to take time to do this kind of work properly.
• Tools: many and varied. Level 4: shared oversight or co-governance. All the methods above get you to a point in time, the highest level of participatory public governance is where you have public transparency, oversight and participation in the ongoing governance of your work. Sometimes this is ostensibly achieved through independent advisory or steering groups, but to operate properly these groups should have their minutes and decisions publicly available to avoid creating unaccountable or self-serving governance. To reflect back to SmartStart in NZ, having independent groups on the project governance

(in this case, via a steering group) provides a balancing force that tips in the favour of the citizen’s needs amidst the ongoing tensions of budget constraints and competitive projects in public sectors. If we had citizens or citizen groups involved in policy governance, I believe we would see greater public outcomes. This is also reflected in the work of Collaboration for Impact. This of course requires ways to support equitable and inclusive representation on such governance groups, which then requires either persistent funded roles or some other funding mechanism. Given so many things in government are funded as projects with start and end dates, it would take some significant work to make this normal in many public sectors, but I suggest it is worth the effort as it sets programs up with oversight and pressures that are well balanced and aligned towards best public outcomes. Engaging with community-run infrastructure Many communities run their own data, analysis and modeling infrastructure. Whether a not for profit NGO, an Indigenous or First Nations community or a town, the insights and intelligence that could help shape and inform policy options and change are worth understanding and building into a policy infrastructure model. This makes it necessary to consider federated architectural design, and ways of sharing insights and patterns across systems without sharing raw data. The progress made in verifiable claims/credentials, as well as in confidentialised computing provide some excellent opportunities for communities and governments to co-create meaningful and empowering policy twins. It also makes sense for government policy infrastructure to be available to communities for them to model, explore and test policy reform options. Policy infrastructure Using our “policy journey map” approach provides an opportunity to identify the necessary ingredients for modern, shared policy infrastructure that supports the proactive management and optimisation of policy settings to deliver the best possible outcomes over time. Imagine for instance, being able to rapidly develop new legislation/regulation with reference implementations circulated for consultation and testing prior to being enacted by parliament (with the usual democratic rigour) and then available as code that same moment for rapid and consistent implementation by all the relevant policy consumers. It is possible, but only through transforming the policy/service continuum. When we make the rules of government authoritatively consumable by software, we dramatically improve the speed and consistency of delivery, with better policy outcomes and compliance. Proposals for reforming how policy is done are understandably met with concerns at whether change would “slow things down”, but a more end- to-end approach to policymaking where instruments are designed for easy implementation actually shortens the time to realise policy outcomes, even if it means a little more time up front. With the high level journey map above, we can then explore and propose the shared and common policy infrastructure we need to support the journey end to end, as per below. These tools are worth building into your departmental core infrastructure, or if it doesn’t exist, into your policy agenda costing. Even “delivery” departments need policy infrastructure, as all public institutions are intended to deliver on policy intent.

CC-BY: Pia Andrews, 2023

The model above includes the following elements, aligned to the broad temporal phases of policy delivery:

To support the Policy Preparation phase

• Public engagement tools to explore, co-design and test policy options, both initially (new policies) and ongoing (continuous improvement to policies and policy interventions).
• Linked and integrated admin data for research, policy modelling and patterns monitoring, best hosted by an independent, highly trusted entity, like the ABS.
• Case law and gazettes as a utility to use for analysis and to test new ideas.
• Publicly available modeling tools for testing and exploring policy change.
• Consistently applied Human Impact Measurement Framework used across government, including for new policy proposals and for monitoring.
• Public repository to share policy tools, government models, measurement frameworks, synthetic population data, etc.

To support the Policy Navigation phase

• A linked data representation of the administrative orders to automate reporting, accountability, auditing, security, access and to streamline MOGs.

• Publicly available Policy as code (intended outcomes, legislation, models, defined target group) available at api.legislation.gov.au

• Policy catalogue where all operational and Government policies can be discovered, along with measures and transparent reporting of progress.

• A “Citizen’s ledger” to record all decisions with traceable explanations, for auditing and citizen access.

• Policy test suite to validate legality of system outputs in gov services and regulated entities.

• Open Feedback loops for public and staff about policies and services, to drive continuous improvement and to identify and mitigate harm.

• Continuous monitoring of policy and human impacts, including dark patterns and quality of life indicators, alongside usual systems monitoring, to ensure adverse impacts are identified early and often.

• Escalation and policy iteration mechanisms to ensure issues detected are acted upon at portfolio and whole of gov levels. Another representation of policy infrastructure for adaptive policy management is below. CC-BY: Pia Andrews, 2023 Policy Twins Although not all policies are legislation or regulation, almost all government services and programs draw upon some legislation/regulation combined with myriad operational policies. The many and varied interpretations of these building blocks of public administration can make it hard to understand which rules are authoritative and which are operational. If we had reference implementations of policy (including legislation and regulation) as code, then we could remove the interpretation gap and have a better chance at identifying and remediating unintended policy issues as they arise.

A Policy Twin is simply the policy equivalent of a “Digital Twin”. Digital Twins provide a digital representation of spatial information like buildings, roads, water and gas pipes, which is used to model town planning, environmental impacts or other spatially driven analyses. A Policy Twin could be as simple as a digital representation of a policy, but could include legislation as code, relevant data (admin data, policy measures, lead and tail indicators, and others), modeling tools, impact monitoring and more. All the things you have seen emerge in the “Digital Twin” space, are possible with Policy Twins, and in fact some Digital Twins have already started including policy as code, such as the inclusion of resource management regulations in the Wellington City Council digital twin to model and display the impacts of changes to the building code. A shift to “CI/CD policy”? It’s clear when you start trying to imagine a more collaborative, adaptive, humane, iterative and test driven approach to policy management, that a lot of the techniques and methods from product management, CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Development) pipelines, service design and agile become useful. So why not reuse some of the infrastructure, tools, methods and platforms that we have adopted in service reforms over the last decade to help modernise policy delivery. Speak to people in your IT department or in the tech sector about the tools required for CI/CD, and consider which ones are relevant to CI/CD policy in your context. We could have CI/CD policy pipelines, policy feedback loops, product management for policy, policy monitoring and measurement tools, policy escalation frameworks, policy test suites, policy twins, and public policy engagement/codesign platforms. Perhaps each policy would have a policy manager who owns the end to end outcome realisation (rather than the current baton passing from design to delivery teams). Perhaps each policy intervention could have its own “policy product owner” who owns the delivery of that intervention, but works to the policy manager with other interventions to make sure interventions are effective, complementary and continuously adapting to change and impact.