The project is innovative in how we work, what we do, and through innovating with the service itself:

1) A genuinely multi-sector approach to addressing major problems, with a combination of voluntary and funded contributors, working together best by building social infrastructure based on an Indigenous knowledge system.

2) We are building the world's first community repository of legislation as code, which will both support great social services, but will also create a means to rebalance power, improve access to justice and encourage a more collaborative and open approach to both law making, and to the public services based on laws.

3) In the "Know your benefits" service, we use interactive stories so people can see what benefits a range of personas are likely to be eligible for, encouraging them to "play" with the rules and learn what might be. Often social services only tell you want you are eligible for today, but don't help people better plan their lives and choices.

As of the date of submission (October 2022), this project has entered the final phase of delivering the MVP, which is due by the end of the year. We gained a first round of funding from the Cardano community to deliver the MVP, and to deliver a reference implementation of legislation/regulation as code, along with a full suite of documentation and tools to help anyone encode their own regulation/legislation as code as public infrastructure. We have:

• delivered an evidence based design brief for the service
• established the architecture and establishment of the system
• encoded the first 5 benefits in openfisca with robust and publicly available law as code infrastructure
• created the partnerships with two major social service providers as first users of the system
• started building the MVP service itself

Once the MVP service is delivered with the first 5 benefits, we will launch it for use, including with a user survey to prioritise expansions and all benefits into the service.

• Individuals from different disciplines and background, bringing technical, legal, policy, design, analysis, content management, etc to the table, building a civil society entity capable of many such projects, inspired by the Govzero movement in Taiwan.
• Digital Legal Systems Lab & Openfisca.
• Social service expertise: Citizens Advice Bureau & Community Law hope to adopt the service to help clients.
• Financial & in kind support from Salsa Digital, Catalyst Cloud, the Cardano community.

Citizens Advice Bureau & Community Law have thousands of volunteers who need any help they can get to support clients, so the "Know your benefits" service has an immediate audience & a need to fill.

Any New Zealander will also be able to use the service, and will be able to get better informed about their legal rights, including to benefits, and their right to an explanation from government.

The collective have a goal to reduce injustice and improve wellbeing, so ideally, everyone benefits.

Firstly, even just talking about legal rights as distinct from operational policies has changed the nature of discussions with several social services. The current New Zealand Government services don't present the rationale for eligibility on ineligibility for social services, let alone a delineation of what is in legislation versus what is in operational policies (rules departments make up for themselves), so this is a helpful but unintended impact.

Impact will be measured through user feedback (CX), by monitoring usage and results from CAB/CL, by monitoring application rates (through OIA requests), & by monitoring requests for explanation.

The project impact will most start when CAB/Community Law start using the service and hundreds or thousands more people each week will start applying for more benefits, and invoking their right to an explanation with the department, which we predict will create some pressure to build more helpful and explainable services from the start.

Encoding the law is always hard work, but the Social Services Act in New Zealand is especially diabolical, as it has been modified so much over the years, and includes a lot of contradictory approaches, definitions, etc. There are benefits, for example, that you are not eligible for unless you are ineligible for every other main benefit, which means you need to codify a lot before you can rule them in or out.

The team all struggled with COVID during the 6 month project, creating productivity issues, and it took a little time to establish our processes, systems, and decision making approaches as a team, because we were building the social infrastructure simultaneous with the project delivery.

Creating a MVP meant having to make hard choices about what to deliver later, but the constant focus on what we deliver to help people today, along with testing and user research to prioritise, helped the team to stay focused on what would actually help most in the first instance.

A combination of skills, decentralised/delegated decision making, and transparency are all critical, so you can ensure all aspects of the project are delivered with the same values, goals and purpose in mind. This means everyone is able to confidently innovate within their domain, and go above and beyond the minimum required, whilst still delivering what they are being relied upon to do. Our weekly all hands and online boards/code/artefacts/docs gave everyone full visibility, making it easy for anyone to chip in and help where needed, and to track delivery, dependencies, blockers and where we needed to collectively lean in.

Financial support was also critical, as was a partnership model where some are contributing from within their work capacity. The combination of people contributing time, volunteering, and some being partially funded meant we could create a diverse team of skills, where everyone had commitment and were able to contribute.

The entire project was designed for replication, with documentation, howtos, reference models, and everything was built with the expectation of extendability, replicability and enabling others to build their own rules as code for any purpose. Our hope is to build more of a community around RaC so everyone can get the service, justice, compliance, transparency and participatory policy benefits that RaC enables!

We have a lot of lessons learned, from the complexity of working with legislation, to the benefits of taking a shared values and community based approach. We would encourage others to consider civil society partnership models as better practice for government innovation, where people across sectors work together around a common problem. Rather than "internal" or "external" innovation, perhaps we just need cross disciplinary and multi-sector innovation, where government is part of civil society, not separate to it.

We also have lessons to share about working remotely, taking a culturally inclusive approach to building the social infrastructure for collaboration, the importance of shared and open governance, and the benefits of purposefully exploring and sharing the vision, mission and behaviours of any group, so as to work carefully and thoughtfully through ambiguity, challenges, and to maintain trust and confidence in each other along the way.