In 2021, Utrecht started developing the Virtual Income Desk with Open Rules. This initiative aims for citizens to always and easily receive all financial regulations to which they are entitled.
For the realization of this goal, standards of the NORA guideline rule management have been used. These standardized rules for the Virtual Income Desk have now been published.
Rules management is applied in various ways by organizations. A constant shared by all organizations is the need to implement the law according to the interpretation intended by the legislator, to act in accordance with the principles of good administration and to be able to adapt implementation as smoothly as possible to new insights from politics.
By applying rule management, the aim is to achieve the following “business” goals:
- Law - the implementation is in accordance with laws and regulations
- Consistent – regardless of channel, laws and regulations are implemented in the same way
- Explainable – the why/right to exist of a service, the rules used in the performance of the service, the individual decision and the intention of the law are available and clear to the customer
- Manoeuvrable – the implementing organization is able to implement changes in legislation and regulations in a timely manner in the various operational components of the organization.
Ultimately, we want to offer a new government-wide rule management library that includes information on product launches, rules management implementation support, best practices, and publishing of rules specifications.
This open-regels.nl website is a community initiative in preparation for the assignment from the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations to publish this new library on regels.overheid.nl.
Do you have any questions or do you want to work with us? Please contact Steven Gort
Open Rules has also recently been introduced in the standardization process of VNG-Realisatie with the aim of helping to develop a standard that fulfills at least the following 4 aspects:
open-regels.nl is closely related to other sources of government information.
Many publications refer to legislation and regulations. For example, from case law, but also from policy decisions and implementation content. A standard has been set up to do this in a standardized and consistent manner. This is the Juriconnect standard for identification of and reference to legislation and regulations. Rules are related to laws and must have an explicit link to wetten.overheid.nl.
The latter has been made suitable for this purpose using the sustainable Juriconnect deep links.
Rules are also related to data they use. Explicit links must be included in the rules to the central location of definitions of government data. data.overheid.nl is the central repository for data sources to which, as far as possible, all known data catalogs of government organizations are linked. A point of attention in data.overheid.nl is the lack of a national reference standard such as juriconnect, and then for sustainable reference to data sources.
Rules use concepts. Within some domains, these terms have been coordinated between chain parties and are available as a kind of dictionary. Rules can refer to these dictionaries to indicate meaning. Dictionaries are available for “environment” and “education”. The long-term reference to concepts is reasonably in order. However, these dictionaries do not yet exist for most domains.
Good steps are now being taken in the Municipal Basic Income Processes (GBI) programme, in which municipalities take the initiative together to devise good solutions based on experiences that can be applied quickly and easily.
First, these applications are tested by leading municipalities and improved where necessary, after which other municipalities can also use the application. Working together within the income domain contributes to a better and personalized service and more efficient processes.
The functionality required to provide an overview of rules is very similar to how a register works, where data.overheid.nl offers a register with references to where data is found, so can Open Rules help to collect references to where rules can be found on, for example, regels.overheid.nl. The choice here is to keep the rules decentralized if a government itself takes care of the publication (and can make it sustainable) or to centralize the storage. Both are happening on data.overheid.nl to make life easier for governments.
Open Rules therefore offers a deployment tool to publish and store information about rules (metadata) as well as the rules themselves.