Machine Readable Laws: Macro-considerations for government digitalization strategy
Applying for tax-payer benefits should be easy. Imagine a public application system, such as unemployment or health refunds, entirely online. This automated system is programmed to fully understand the relevant laws, providing an immediate eligibility determination, and, except in more complicated circumstances, with limited need for staff oversight. This system would save both citizens and public servants time and money and send needed benefits to citizens soon after completing their application.
While this may seem a level of efficiency beyond government capabilities, New Zealand developed a Better Rules for Government Discovery Report to transform the entire country's legislation to be machine-readable (translating the text to computer code). Government websites and apps can provide instant approval for citizens to receive public services.
Surveys show that citizens want to access government benefits online. In a study of seven rich countries, Accenture found that in each country, more than 60% of people stated they would be more likely to "engage" with their governments if more e-services were available. In 2000, only 450 million people used the internet every three months; today, it's 3.4 billion. While consumers can now expect digital services from online retail and banking to therapy, governments seem to be the last movers to transform the entire customer journey to be digital. The public sector's complexity and scale hinder digital transformation, which is a strategic, interdisciplinary, and long term process.
Many governments increasingly offer essential information online and even publish laws on legislative websites; others lag. Europe is the only region where all countries meet or exceed the global average for e-government services. Digital services can improve legislative efficiency, customer service, ease of use, transparency, and after initial set-up costs, to save administrative and operating costs, making the eventual transition to digital essential for every modern government.
The push toward digitization also exposes pre-existing gaps in government strategy around technology. Successful implementation requires more robust regulations on data privacy and storage and transparency and bias protections for software to create equitable access for all citizens. Without these needed plans, governments may adopt digital services using outdated legislation and legacy processes not designed to govern digital systems.
Designed by Jordan Shapiro
Machine Readable laws
New Zealand and Estonia have initiatives to convert all legislation to be coded for machines to read and interpret easily. Writing laws as code allows computers to check consistency and logic and create transparent ledgers recording how policies are applied. It enables real-time data effectiveness and modernizes the policymaking process.
In wealthy countries, the scaffolding of digital infrastructure already exists. Estonia, the United Kingdom, the United States, to name a few, already publish laws into a public, digital database. France is updating its tax laws to be machine-readable as well.
Implementing machine-readable laws updates the way citizens can interact with legislation and policies. Improving services that help them understand how laws apply to their situation, something a government worker or lawyer would need to assist in today. Such systems are an essential step to bringing governance into the 21st century.
Modern policymaking is already complicated, and digitizing the system creates additional privacy and security vulnerabilities, calling for a macro strategy as governments interface with technology. This plan would create standards for citizen's privacy data use, guidelines for government software makers on ethics and transparency, robust infrastructure, and above all, transparency and accountability in defining and executing these guidelines.
Systems flow map for considerations for digitizing government systems. Designed by Jordan Shapiro
Digital legislation in practice
The United States has around 30,000 federal laws. Each law interacts with others at the federal, state, and local levels. This network of rules is so complex it exceeds individual human comprehensibility, necessitating that even lawyers have teams of assistants and use machine learning to sift through them. Democratic systems have a vital tenet that citizens govern themselves, but the network of laws is too complicated for even trained professionals to understand alone.
As mentioned above, digital legislative systems already exist. Citizens can access some or most laws online. The databases are searchable but linear; the user needs to know their specific search criteria. Reading one bill can send a user along a dozen redirects to read associated and referenced legislation. If a law changes or needs to be updated, it is a manual process and does not update connected systems. In other words, while legislation is accessible, the user interface and experience is lacking. Machine-readable laws are a potential solution, both by ensuring that the user-facing side of benefits websites is consistently updated and continuously updating the network of related laws to keep legislative databases clean and up-to-date.
In New Zealand's initiative Better Rules for Government Discovery Report, researchers outlined a case updating this process with machine-readable legislation. It is much more than the opportunity to access laws and bills on the internet. If a citizen applies for unemployment benefits, and the laws change, their benefits would immediately reflect those changes with no additional work on their part. If it is well designed, the system will be easy to use; it will be a digital, responsive ecosystem that allows for updates to be automatically reflected across the adjacent legislation and dependent services.
Designed by Jordan Shapiro
Considerations for dual-use technologies
To keep up with the pace of modernization, governments need to digitize. Still, digital technology is dual-use, meaning it can be beneficial or harmful depending on the creator, user, and application. Some of the most successful entities in the modern world, large corporations, have used digital services and data to their advantage to keep up with the changing needs of consumers and stakeholders.
Those same firms have utilized data in a game of financial and social Darwinism, with virtually no oversight from governments about how data is collected and used, demonstrating that the efficiency benefits can be overshadowed by consequences to equality, privacy, and property.
Governments are incentivized to be the first movers to establish digital ethics guidelines to prevent companies from creating legal precedents around privacy and transparency. These goals would include robust and transparent ethics, privacy, and data use and ownership guidelines to protect citizens. Initiatives like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act begin this process, but they more robustly regulate firms rather than establish a precedent for regulating digital governance. Those mechanisms are outside the scope of this piece but must be considered. As more services exist primarily or exclusively online, governments will play an essential role in the success or failure of protecting citizens' digital privacy.
In addition to protecting citizens, the need for a more extensive cybersecurity infrastructure becomes paramount. Hackers target governments, corporations, private citizens alike, and government databases are already strategic targets for disruptors. Estonia, which built a fully digital society with digital voting, benefits, legislation, and more, is one of the more successful governments in dealing with online security; NATO relocated its cybersecurity department to Tallinn, Estonia in 2007 due to their excellence. The excitement to implement technology for efficiency is just one half of the equation. Updating security protections requires time, creativity, and skill. Increasingly, governments are adopting technology without appropriate security scaffolding in place.
Security is essential to protect citizens, but also to transparency. Processes like seeking benefits from the state will potentially become more objective and more standardized. However, thanks to human rights and social justice advocates' work, we know that even machines can reflect biases and social stratifications already present in society. Open source algorithms can mitigate some of these concerns. While machines can support compliance efficiency, human checks and updates to the system will remain essential to monitor biases and other unforeseen collateral issues.
Machine-readable legislation is just one part of modernization.
Machine-readable legislative infrastructure is a giant step toward modernizing the policy landscape. Digital laws make understanding and compliance more straightforward, and computers' processing power could prevent loopholes and inconsistencies that human workers miss. However, to truly enjoy the benefits of digital legislation, other aspects of governance require upgrades and regulation to bring policy systems into the twenty-first century.
Cloud communities need a range of digital infrastructure to be successful in the 21st century. Icons from left to right: Transactions, software, transpiration, satellites, wireless networking, personal equipment, data, sustainable electricity, data storage, and transparent guidelines.
Designed by Jordan Shapiro
First is the need to improve data-driven, adaptability of policies. In the information age, data drives decision-making processes. However, many outdated policies remain on the books. For example, only in 2013 did France overturn a law requiring women to wear skirts, and it's still legal to shoot a Welsh person with a crossbow after dark in Chester, England. Server-based, machine-readable legislation could quickly identify these problematic laws. Other policies are more elusive. The American Social Security system has a routine cost of living adjustment based on national wages. The data underlying the changes have not aligned with actual living costs since the 1980s. Policymakers have access to wage data but haven't adapted cost of living adjustments to reflect that information. A machine-readable system programmed with real wage data could have built in triggers to update the cost of living, and therefore benefits, automatically.
Continuous updating applies to physical and digital infrastructure as well. For much of the early-aughts, government digital services were mainly for internal use only. Today, many of those systems are also user-facing. Website and application design is a continually evolving art, reflecting changes in human-design understanding and in citizen needs. Migrating more services online also demands improved information technology infrastructure and user-facing portals, so everyone has equal access to those services. Governments are well-positioned to prioritize those updates, yet they remain elusive, leaving many government service websites outdated and challenging to use.
The world has entered the digital age. Governments must capitalize on the power, efficiency, and clarity of the digital revolution, updating historical systems and, in some cases, completely redesigning outdated institutions. Citizens want to engage with their governments online, and governments will be more efficient and make better policies by utilizing digital infrastructure. Computer-assisted analysis of all the laws in a country could greatly benefit citizen services, but it is just one aspect of modernization. Building a macro strategy that includes regulation, iteration, infrastructure provisions, and best-practice security and privacy protections for end-users ensures the systems can manage the complexities of contemporary life.