The second day of the 2026 OpenFisca Conference in Canberra brought together policymakers, technologists, researchers, and civic innovators from across the globe. From Better Rules to benefit navigators, from New Caledonia’s housing crisis to AI’s role in policy infrastructure — it was a day packed with insight, debate, and inspiration. Here’s our recap of the morning sessions.
Starting on the same page: what are Rules as Code and Better Rules?
Nadia Webster, soon-to-be Design Lead for Business Rules at New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development, opened the day by taking us back to 2018 — when she was the original author of Better Rules.
The problem she set out to solve was familiar to anyone who’s worked in government: policy development is disconnected from implementation. Siloes lead to translation errors, and policy intent doesn’t get delivered. The classic example? Holiday pay. Misinterpretation of policy led to multi-million dollar payroll mistakes across New Zealand — not because anyone was careless, but because the system wasn’t designed to keep policy intent intact through implementation.
Rules as Code is the answer to that problem. It means making rules both human and machine consumable — delivered as an API for service delivery, with equivalent readable versions so the code itself is understandable, not just executable.
Better Rules takes this further: it’s a systematic, co-designed approach that combines the social process of Rules as Code with continuous feedback loops. By involving policy people, service designers, and technical teams together from the start, Better Rules delivers a much better chance of policy intent actually being met — including the possibility of third-party providers interacting with a shared Rules API.
The start and international growth of OpenFisca
Matti Schneider, Executive Director of the OpenFisca Association, traced the journey from OpenFisca’s origins in 2011 as an economic policy modelling tool, through its first use for service delivery in 2014 (taxation of companies in France), to the landmark moment at the Open Government Partnership hackathon in Paris in December 2016 — where a team modelled the tax system of an entire country and delivered a full ecosystem of tools in just 36 hours.
That demonstration led to a mandate from the French Government to develop OpenFisca globally. Matti moved to New Zealand in 2018, where the Better Rules team and his “law as code” team came together and coined the term Rules as Code — a blend of both approaches that has since been adopted around the world.
How countries discover and adopt Rules as Code: the case of Japan
Haruko Izuhara, researcher and writing analyst at Markhor Corp, shared findings from her work with Japan’s Digital Agency — established in 2021 — on legislative drafting. Early research looked at Denmark, Germany, and the EU, where some drafting was already happening in XML format from the very beginning of the process. Japan accelerated its decision to fully digitise its official gazette as a result.
By 2024–25, over 20 jurisdictions and 62 initiatives were underway globally, spanning OpenFisca, Blawx, and GenAI approaches. Digital-ready legislation is now recognised as a critical part of Rules as Code. Haruko’s latest report — concluded just last week — will be made public in the coming months.
State of OpenFisca: a global tour
Matti hosted a rapid-fire global tour of OpenFisca adoption, with short presentations from community members around the world.
France (Sandra Chakroun): France uses OpenFisca for budgetary impact assessment, with a growing gallery of implementations. As the original host country, France has multiple local models as extensions — though no single national model.
Spain (Barcelona): Les Meves Ajudes calculates 43 social benefits and has already run over 6,000 simulations in 2026. Social benefits are the low-hanging fruit — not necessarily simple, but with strong buy-in and direct citizen impact. Tax is harder; the risk of tax aversion makes departments cautious.
Tunisia (Mahdi Ben Jelloul, co-founder of OpenFisca, via video): Tunisia’s model covers income tax, social security, monetary transfers (including Amen Social), and both private and public sector pensions, with ongoing work on indirect taxation. Matti highlighted Tunisia’s approach of engaging legal experts to add legislative references to every rule — a production-grade standard the Association strongly encourages.
Africa (Ivory Coast / Senegal): OpenFisca Senegal is being used to teach students how to code, with models primarily used by academics including PhD students. Matti noted this as a valuable use case — academia as a base that allows others to start, with publicly available models across three African countries.
Paraguay (Ernesto Rodriguetti): Inspired by Uruguay’s base model (now unmaintained), Ernesto wrote his PhD on microsimulation and expanded the model to Paraguay, covering personal income tax and several social security benefits.
Canada (Montreal): CivicTech Montreal discovered a dormant OpenFisca package built by government and revived it as a community project. Their first concrete project tackled overtime rules for truck and bus drivers — expanding the user-facing layer, building a bilingual interface, adding evidence-building features so drivers can document disputes with employers, integrating an AI chat system, and expanding test cases from 5 to 23. They’re now looking at housing affordability. Matti called it inspiring: because it was open source, it could stay dormant until someone discovers it and finds it’s a treasure.
French Polynesia (Yannick Gooding, Tax Office): French Polynesia began its modernisation program in 2015 and adopted OpenFisca in 2020. VAT integration went live in 2021, payroll taxes in 2022. Today, the two main sources of revenue for the state of French Polynesia are calculated by OpenFisca — live, in production, for five years. Current projects include property tax and corporate tax, with transaction tax next year. Matti: Tahiti is a great source of inspiration.
Japan (Koichiro Shiratori): Starting as a civic tech prototype in 2022, the Benefit Navigator was released in 2026 — a collaboration between government and public streams that have now merged. The vision: government develops at scale, while CivicTech and NPOs experiment and explore, realising OpenFisca for citizens through a multi-stakeholder approach.
New Caledonia (Maxime Bollengier): Started with a proof of concept last year, New Caledonia has identified three use cases — reforming housing assistance (done), limiting the public sector age bill (in progress), and reviewing tax loopholes (in progress). The approach: start with the problem, gather the data, codify the regulations, deliver a minimal interface. The ten-year vision: all socially-focused rules coded in OpenFisca, creating a common good accessible to everyone.
New Zealand (Hamish Fraser, Syncopate): The OF-Aotearoa project has been running since 2018, in and out of government. Over the past year the focus has been on making workflows more efficient — including a visual map of the codebase where you can click on nodes and see the legislation reference. benefitme.nz was archived due to maintenance burden, but a project is investigating streamlined maintenance with improved legislation referencing. Future dreams include a community of maintainers, a beneficiary advocacy dashboard, and an OpenFisca standard for naming variables.
Australia’s whole-of-government approach
Sharyn Clarkson from the Department of Finance shared how Australia is taking a uniquely broad approach to Rules as Code through GovCMS — the large whole-of-government content management platform.
Before GovCMS, there were 350 different content management systems across Canberra. Sharyn’s team didn’t want to wait until there were 350 different RaC implementations. Their ethos: fiercely open source, empowering others rather than directing from the centre.
The approach started with a sandpit program — letting agencies try Rules as Code with no risk, fully funded. The result: 16 sandpits across 13 agencies. Now they’re moving to full enterprise-level production, with the first enterprise platform going live around mid-year.
Key lessons: you need champions. You need something real to show. And don’t underestimate the need to support agency teams — Sharyn’s team learned they needed to help their government agency contacts understand who to sell this to inside their agencies.
An unexpected discovery: a “content as API” project — making all government content reusable — is converging with Rules as Code. In the last three months we’ve realised they’re converging. Rules as Code is going to be integral to that.
How Assemblic reduces the cost of implementing Rules as Code
Con Fountas from Assemblic gave the sponsor address. He opened by talking about the many hats he wears — as Assemblic founder, Salsa Digital director, and OpenFisca Board member.
Assemblic was born from Salsa Digital’s work on the GovCMS sandpit program. While Salsa provides services, Assemblic provides the infrastructure platform (currently undergoing IRAP assessment). Assemblic’s mission: tools to help Rules as Code achieve wider adoption.
Con acknowledged that the benefits of Rules as Code have been talked about for years — championed by many, documented in OECD reports — yet wide-ranging adoption remains scarce and rarely moves beyond proof-of-concept stage. Two main reasons: leadership at senior levels of government (less of a barrier in Australia thanks to Sharyn and the GovCMS team), and the sheer scale of work involved.
What’s changed? AI. Assemblic Codify is designed to help with the scale of the work involved, providing a pathway for Rules as Code to finally deliver on its remarkable promise.
The economic relevance of Rules as Code
Tim De Sousa from FTI Consulting tackled the question of how to convince people to invest in Rules as Code. His team identified ten possible projects, selected one, and did a full cost-benefit analysis on RaC-enabled planning consents at local government level — covering both complying development consents and full development assessments.
The analysis looked at time savings and resource finding, with qualitative assessment of user experience alongside the numbers. Tim noted that with today’s tools, the investment required is smaller — meaning the cost-benefit ratio is now significantly higher than when the analysis was done two years ago. The client didn’t publish the report, but the findings were written up in The Mandarin.
Matti commented that the key slide was the cost:benefit findings, namely that for every $1 invested in RaC-enabled solution, $2.61 of benefits is delivered.
A global consultation on Rules as Code
Natalie Cohen from the OECD and Hakke Hansen from SPRIN-D (Germany) announced a new international consultation on the digital provision of law. SPRIN-D sees laws as code as essential for digitisation and is developing a shared reference architecture for the next 18 months — aggregating existing approaches, discussing core principles, initiating reference specifications, and planning conferences.
Matti noted that the OECD has been recommending adoption of Rules as Code and OpenFisca in yearly reports since 2020, and is now taking it a step further with the German Parliament. Hopefully this will help with Rules as Code at scale.
The OpenFisca Association: structuring digital commons
Matti closed the morning session with an update on the OpenFisca Association’s first year of operation.
The Association supports adoption — not through training or coding, but through training materials, promotion, conferences, social media, and effectively doing pre-sales for the ecosystem. New implementers joining this year include GovTech Tokyo and the Institute for Poverty Prevention (Japan).
Key activities: organising collaboration spaces (like this conference), asynchronous communication via Slack, and — new for 2026 — working groups. The Association also coordinates crisis response: when a cyber attack in November impacted many open source projects, the Association coordinated a response, shutting down affected services in 8 hours and restoring them within a week.
The bigger vision: to provide a blueprint for sustainability and adoption of digital commons.
Fishbowl: adoption strategies
The morning closed with a fishbowl discussion on obstacles and enablers for Rules as Code adoption. Key themes:
- Decision makers are both the biggest obstacle and the biggest enabler. You need to convince them it’s viable and will return value.
- Siloed information — administrative gatekeepers who hold data and aren’t incentivised to share it.
- Capability gaps — policy people need to be part of the journey, not just technologists. Culture change is as important as tooling.
- IT teams buried in BAU — no space to innovate, and IT is still seen as something that happens downstream.
- Hype cycles — the risk that AI funding bubbles inflate expectations and then collapse, taking legitimate work with them.
- Fear of transparency — some decision makers worry about what happens when legislation is open. Policy happens in a black box.
- Awareness — many people simply don’t know Rules as Code exists. Case studies and proof points are the antidote.
- Competing with big consultancies — enterprise companies know the unspoken rules of government procurement. The open source community needs to learn to be influencers, inside and outside government. Sharyn pointed to Drupal and GovCMS as the reference model: from the outside edge to the mainstream. Pia added to this, talking about how the big consultancy companies are so influential with decision makers because they make them feel safe.